Chance
by Jaya Mitai
Summary: Written for the LJ sg1teamficathon back in December. Written for sarahjane. Sam and Daniel make what should have been their final decision, but the best laid plans . . .


Disclaimer – Not mine. Owned by MGM. No money. Don't sue. Originally written for the Livejournal SG-1 Team Ficathon (username: sg1ficathon). It occurred to me, since it got nominated for some fancy award, I should probably actually archive it somewhere. Also, it's a shameless plug in an effort to get more interest in the team ficathon for next year! Go to Livejournal and search sg1ficathon to read yummy teamy goodness!

But first read this fic. Since you're here and all . . .

- . -

Chance Part 1

Title: Chance

Author: Mitai

Rating: PG-13. Light swearing. Oh. And violence. Almost forgot about that.

Written for: sarahjane (thehallway)

Who wants: The team in a mission going south.

And doesn't want: Sam stuck in the background.

Many thanks to lullabyeleague for hours spent up late at night beta-ing for me! This would be a very different fic if not for her help! Word count ends up at 23,396 without the disclaimer. Happy holidays, thehallway! Hopefully this fits the bill!

- . -

"Get up."

She almost didn't recognize the croak as her own voice; it was harsh and low and full of ash. So were her eyes. She could see the blurry outline of soft grey flakes clinging to her eyelashes as she blinked. Focus was quick in coming, but showed little detail. Everything around her was covered in the residue of the blast, it was still settling out of the air. Idly she watched the airborne cinders drifting festively and swirling devilishly in the updrafts of small secondary flames.

She must have been unconscious only for minutes.

They might still have time.

The thought spurred her stunned brain into action. Needed to get up. Needed to find him. Get him up. Get them out.

She shook her head, dislodging the ash and burned paper that had so recently been safe and unassuming in neat rows of metal file cabinets. Doubtless those cabinets had saved her life, they'd been ripped apart. Big blast, must have been huge . . . But not big enough.

But what if . . . ?

They had to get up.

The room was very dimly lit, and resembled a child's unmade bed. Not a single structure in the room had remained intact. Tiny fires were burning themselves out every few seconds, smoldering a moment before reluctantly subsiding. The smoke had already filled the upper cavities of the partially collapsed chamber, and the air near the floor was starting to choke. The foglike quality and red of the coals and embers gave everything a deadly orange glimmer.

Almost like a hand device.

The doorframe, being an arch and thus architecturally sound, had survived the initial blast and was relatively unblocked. The door had blown inwards, as she'd known it would, and was nowhere in sight. The hall showed a faintly whiter light than the chamber, and she knew it had to be daylight. There might be a way out.

Needed to get up. Needed to find him.

She found that she was lying mostly on her left side, her hips twisted and her legs bent beneath the end of one of the support beams that had been hidden behind the incinerated ceiling tiles. She should have thought of that, of the fire traveling through the crawlspace. Lucky it hadn't come squarely down on her.

It should have. The whole place should have.

She tried to straighten her back, gasping at a sudden pain not unlike a dirk being slowly but inexorably driven into her right kidney. The gasp made her choke, and by the time she caught her breath she wasn't entirely sure she hadn't lost and regained consciousness somewhere along the way. She was now flat on her back, and the dirk – probably a piece of the file cabinets, actually – had given up stabbing for burning. Burning unlike anything she'd ever felt. Burning like she had dipped the end of the metal shard into molten lava, and it was conducting that earth-melting heat directly into her body.

She scrabbled for it, cursing her right hand as torn fingers fumbled uncoordinatedly across her hip, working up to her back. Nearly at her spine she felt it, something hard, something foreign.

No telling how deep it was. No telling if removing it would do more harm than good.

No. It was hot, it would have been superheated by the air. It would have cauterized the wound. And if she pulled it, would the scabs come free?

She'd do more damage moving with it in than out. She turned her head away, a childhood reaction to shots, and made sure she had a firm grip on the metal. Her fingertips were numb, from burns or worse. It was hard to control her hand, she wondered if she'd raised it to cover her head when the blast hit them. Couldn't remember the blast hitting.

Didn't want to. She closed her eyes, and tightened her grip, exhaling for the pull.

But there was no need. It came out in her fingers, slowly pulling away from her skin like a credit card rubber-cemented to thick paperstock. There was a building pain as she did so, a sharp, hot pain, and her eyes widened momentarily as more adrenaline poured into her blood.

And she realized she was staring right at him.

Somehow they had fallen so that they were facing each other. They'd retreated to the back of the room, with five rows of paper-filled metal boxes between them and the door. Had hoped their weight and density would lend some protection. Had hoped it wouldn't matter anyway. It put them against the outer wall, with their feet pointed at the inner hallway. That outer wall was still intact, no holes to the outside world, and in the light of only the small fires she couldn't see anything other than his face. He was covered by debris, and that main supporting beam that had so luckily not pinned her lay directly across his lower body.

His eyes were open, dazed and unfocused and the skin that gathered around them made his expression seem frightened. It was a very foreign look on his features, and she didn't like it.

"Daniel?" It was another rasp, it almost choked her. It was too dark to see his pupils, to see even her own reflection. But she could see he wasn't seeing. He wasn't even blinking; she watched a small, grey, charred piece of paper flutter delicately over to land gently on his cornea.

He didn't even reflexively flinch.

"Daniel . . .?"

She curled on her left side, dropping the piece of whatever was in her hand – it didn't matter now, the pain was muted, overwhelmed by something else altogether. The heat of the room was moving the air, moving a small lock of his hair that had escaped his bandana. It was singed at the very end, only five or six separate hairs clinging together, their burned tips bleeding a tiny mural of carbon upon his forehead.

"No." It wasn't even audible. "No."

She clumsily rolled to her hands and knees, favoring her back as much as she could and pulling herself completely out from underneath the beam that had so luckily fallen on him, rather than her. She began ripping away the smaller wreckage that clung almost protectively to him, exposing his vest, his throat, his arms, curled high on his chest. No injury was visible, not through the smaller bits of rubble and soot. Her fingertips were too numb, she couldn't feel his pulse, couldn't see him breathe.

As soon as she had thrown the biggest pieces to the side she threw herself on his chest, willing herself to hear a heartbeat. She wasn't going to leave him here, not if there was a chance, not if –

There was no way to know if she was listening to only the blood behind her ears. The pulse was soft and quick and as she lay across him, with her inner wrist laying across his chest, she could finally feel motion. A faint tightening of his skin, a faint firming of the muscles beneath her cheek.

A breath. He was breathing.

There was still a chance.

She began frantically digging the rest of him out, not caring about the heat, not registering the small rips as her fingers met sharp edges. The rest of it she could move, but not that beam. It was huge; one of the main support beams for the floor above, it had ripped the ceiling away when the blast had rocked the crawlspace. It was easily twenty feet in length, and the majority of it was buried beneath the rubble that had been the wall that connected this chamber with its brother.

The blast had come from the main generator, the center of the badly designed complex. If it had collapsed the wall between this room and the next, it had ballooned out just like she'd thought – but the crawlspace. Force she had thought would have no escape found a release in the crawlspace. She'd miscalculated.

Badly.

And if the heat and the blast had done this much damage to relatively distant rooms anyway . . .

Not now. Now think about levering tons of rock.

Because that was what she had to do, to get him free. She scooted to the bottom half of his body, noting the beam had fallen across his legs right beneath the knee. She felt the area gently, unable to see for dust and dark, and found that she could just push her fingers between the beam and his legs. She would have breathed a sigh of relief if she could have – she had to keep ducking to the very floor to suck air between her teeth. Very soon it would be impossible to breathe.

She had to get him out. Get him out now.

It was hard to move in a crouch. Her right leg kept trying to rotate in her hip socket, it was impossible to keep the leg perpendicular with the floor, and her knee seemed too fluid to handle any weight. Her right arm was heavy and difficult to manage, and her right hand and wrist had no strength.

Maybe the metal had gotten closer to her spine than she thought. Maybe swelling. Maybe just shock. It hadn't seemed to affect her left side, and she bent at the waist, favoring her back and sucking in the deepest breath she dared.

Then she set herself with her left leg forward, tightened the joint, and pulled.

It was hard to judge in the moving light, but she guesstimated she was able to lift it about an inch before the rubble that pinned the beam to the floor was immovable. And it took all her strength. There was no way to let go of the beam and pull him out.

She'd have to wedge something under it once she lifted it.

She was getting close to panic, between the air and her own pain and sense of urgency. There was no way the secondary had blown. The entire inner ring of the structure would have been destroyed. But there was no way the structure could have absorbed this much damage without imminent collapse of the second power source. It was going to go, sooner or later. There was no way to know how long she'd been unconscious, it would be minutes only, and she'd burned a lot of time.

She scrabbled over the pile of debris she'd flung so cavalierly to the side, located a chunk of the wall that seemed the right width. It was a little rounder than she would have liked, but it was the only thing remotely the right size and strength.

Sam rolled the dense piece towards her, again leaning into the floor, sucking another breath. Her teeth only filtered out the biggest pieces of rubble and ash, and those that got through burned painfully against the back of her throat. Her back was quietly smoldering from the exertion, and she clung to the feeling of urgency, depending on it for another dose of adrenaline, of strength.

She'd have to kick it under with her right foot. Smoke stung her eyes as she arranged herself, braced herself, and lifted.

At first she thought the explosion was merely the pile of rubble shifting and her already stunned ears playing tricks on her. The beam was ripped away from her as though it were a pen an angry professor slapped from her grasp, and as she tried to hang onto it she was bodily yanked off her feet. She felt the beam shudder as it tried to rip into the solid rock floor beneath her, and forced her hands to release it.

She lay where she felt until the shaking stopped, and it occurred to her in a detached sort of way that the explosion was fairly mild, comparatively, and was likely an ancillary system. A prerequisite for the real thing.

They might still have time.

Her right side burned now with more intensity, as though a small flame were incinerating the muscles beneath her skin. Every movement brought it oxygen, made it burn more brightly, burn deeper and she could almost feel the tissue curling and flaking away, to drift through the air as velvetly as the ashes that tried to choke her. The air near the floor was no longer clear enough to make out the lay of the land, but she had a sense that the entire wall had shifted. The shift had revealed a monitor, still partially in its metal rack and flickering on and off, mutedly white and red in the smoke as it flashed out diagnostics and alarms.

She didn't marvel that it was still working, that there was still power. She used it to see, to determine that Daniel was almost completely freed. The beam had rolled to the right, and both his legs were exposed to the ankles.

There was a deafening crack, it sounded right above her head. As sudden and sharp as thunder, but earthier. The concrete slab right over their head, through the crawlspace.

Sam choked on the smoke and dust, grabbing at the tops of his field-issue boots. The leather was strong, and the boots steel-toed, so she still had some hope that his feet might be intact. She was able to work his left one out altogether, but his right boot gave only an inch before the rubber sole, which extended further than the leather side itself, caught on the inner edge of the beam solidly.

"Come on!" It grated out from behind a clenched jaw. She wasn't going to get it out, he was going to be trapped –

Get his foot out of the boot.

She clumsily reached across her torn vest, finding a velcroed pocket above the D-ring. Her secondary knife was still there, she'd forgotten about it earlier. It was little more than a box-cutter, and it took both hands for her to force the razor blade out of the protective sleeve.

"Daniel, you have to help me. Listen to me."

It was hard to keep hold of the knife, it kept trying to slip from her nerveless fingers. She had to use the heel of her hand to push the single blade through the tough shoestring, and was afraid she'd nicked him as she lost control of the knife. She slapped the flat blade, afraid of losing it in the rubble and the dark, and after a brief struggle was able to coax a stiff index finger to curl underneath it.

She grabbed it again, only able to get control of it if she held it like a two year old might grasp a fork. A moment's concentration, and the last of the shoestring was severed. The leather tongue bore telltale scratches from the tip, but it wasn't punctured, and she pulled it far forward, exposing black sock.

"Daniel, can you hear me?"

She couldn't see if the foot was crushed or not. She grasped his ankle and gave a tug, and his foot slipped almost easily out of the boot. It collapsed sideways as soon as she'd pulled him free, and she could see that part of the sole had melted against the beam.

"Daniel!"

She let his foot go, crawling back towards his head, keeping as low the ground as possible. The shifting of the debris and the second wave of hot air had circulated the smoke a little, and for a moment she was able to take a breath without hacking it right back out.

Daniel's eyes were still open, still sightless. She grabbed his face between her hands, shaking him as roughly as she dared. "Daniel!"

An uncoordinated motion, maybe an attempt to free his head. It shifted the field napkin he tied around his head for digs, and she pulled it completely off, fumbling with the knot as she struggled to untie it.

"Daniel, we have to go! You have to get up!"

She was screaming, trying to be heard over a roar that had cropped up at some point – maybe air moving between this floor through the crack in the floor above her. She wasn't sure he heard. Gradually she'd worked out the knot, and she looped the two longest corners around his face, pulling the cloth over his nose and mouth. It wouldn't do much. She knew it was futile but she forced her stiff fingers to tie the knot, tangling some of his hair into it in the process. She hauled him into a sitting position, moving closer to him and getting up to her knees. She would never make a fireman's carry, not with her right leg.

He never made a sound, she wouldn't have been sure he was aware at all unless she had felt the slight tensing of the muscles of his right arm as she slung it around her neck. He was trying to hang on, trying to help her. Her left leg trembled dangerously as she used it to push off from the floor, this time lifting not only her weight but his with her. There was a painful, sharp snap of bone glancing off bone in her knee, but it did not buckle, and then she tried to move.

It was a balancing act. She couldn't support even her own weight on her right leg, but the weight of Daniel on her left acted a little as a counterbalance. She bore their combined weight on one leg, swinging his weight forward before she would take a step with her right foot, so that by falling she was able to get her left foot in front of her, to keep them both upright, and use his weight solely to propel them forward.

It was almost impossible to see, and impossible to breathe. The smoke was far too dense, it had extinguished most of the flames, and the only light she could see was a very gradual lessening of the pitch blackness. It didn't matter – all she had to do was follow the right wall. It would take them back to the closest door to the outer ring, and she was pretty sure there was a breach in that wall.

No, the problem was breathing.

She buried her face in Daniel's shoulder to breathe, and the fabric of his uniform did little better than her teeth as a filter. She was retching before they'd made it out of the chamber, and her right leg was shaking in a pronounced and emphatic way.

The dense smoke dissipated slightly as she hit the halls, and Carter did her best to speed up the rhythm. Step, fall, catch, breathe. One step after another. Just get out into the valley. Find shelter. Radio the position.

Few would have survived the initial explosion, and assuming the smaller blast hadn't been the main secondary, few were going to survive the next one. The smoke would form a column two miles high. It would help in locating them, make the base visible to the UAV.

There was a chance.

It took forever, but soon she didn't have to put shoulder to the right wall to walk, she could take a breath without retching. The uneven floor beneath her feet was well-lit, and she had been right – the door that had led to the second ring of the structure was gone, and the reflective polymer that had made the base invisible to camera and IR had been shattered with the force of the blast. The fragments were brittle but sharp, and the pieces of flotsam and jetsam rolled treacherously beneath her feet.

She was out in the open now, stumbling across flatter, rockier ground. There was a treeline ahead, yards she'd have to cross with no walls to catch her. She couldn't tell if Daniel was still hanging on. His weight was dead against her right side, his head hung heavily against his chest, and his toes dragged along behind her with no effort to take a step. She could not even be certain he was still breathing. She might have suffocated him, his breath had been so weak. She might have collapsed a lung by dragging him like she was, he might have had a broken neck –

Her stomach tightened threateningly, and her right leg gave. They hit the ground hard, but she barely registered the pain for the contractions in her throat. She turned her face away from Daniel and vomited.

There was no mistaking the third blast for anything other than the secondary generator. It shook the very earth against her back, and she squeezed her eyes tightly closed.

She never let go of his arm. He never spoke.

The world spun wildly, the very air vibrated with the fury of the noiseless roar. It was too loud to hear, it pushed outwards with such force that the air molecules couldn't hold a wave pattern long enough for her eardrum to recognize it. The entire planet whipped around the sun in only a few seconds. It felt as though she had been bound against a wagon wheel and her head was being ground against the dirt, and then her feet, and then her head, and then her feet –

She gagged again but her stomach was empty, and when the dizzying feeling didn't stop she opened her eyes, trying to get her bearings.

The trees were walking.

Sam clenched her eyes shut, and when the nausea still didn't pass, she opened them again.

The trees hadn't stopped. They were tilting wildly and dancing all around her, as though their roots were feet and their trunks had been painted with a dappling of dazzling sunlight. An odd fog surrounded them, brown rather than black, so that they loomed suddenly or shied back and disappeared in the blink of an eye. They creaked out a chant over the never-ending, deep groan of earth, and waved their branch arms over the pair, in a blessing or a greeting or a farewell. They whirled around her, mimicking the clouds visible in the afternoon sky.

The clouds couldn't be spinning like that.

She tried to pick up her head, recognizing the resistance, the pressure on her neck instantly. It was pretty mild, less than she would feel in a 747 passenger jet during take-off. A last burst of adrenaline gave her a brief moment of clear sight.

They had fallen on a thick, brittle slab of slate covered in dirt, and it was sledding down the side of the mountain, rotating in an almost gentle, clockwise manner. All around them dirt, trees, and rocks tumbled through an eerie, dusty fog.

A landslide. They were riding the top of a landslide.

Sam closed her eyes, laid her head back on the stone, and waited. Her exhausted brain stalled on the mathematics of their odds. Before her experiences with SG1, she had always supposed in a panic or torture situation she would rely on mathematics, on numbers, to keep her brain occupied and clear. She had used the technique in controlled classroom settings when sodium pentothal had been administered in conjunction with hypnosis. The math prevented her from focusing enough on the hypnotist to be entrapped.

It had also helped, to a tiny degree, when she'd been drugged with the Blood of Sokar. It had helped her deal with the agony of the cold and her exhaustion in Antarctica.

But now just remembering the times math had helped her concentrate was . . . numbing. She couldn't spare the energy for memories, let alone calculate their position, the hypotenuse of the triangle she was making as they sledged down towards the river. If she recalled their trip in correctly, the river had once been significantly higher, so there was likely to be a ledge and a height involved. Soon they'd come across a large enough rock that their slate would be forced upon its end, or the edge of the cliffs, and they would be crushed.

She'd accepted this already. They'd said their goodbyes.

She just hadn't expected it all to take so long.

It was as though their rock sled had heard her thoughts. There was a deafening crack, a moment of complete stillness, and the sickening lurch of everything dropping away beneath them.

They fell for an eternity. It wasn't like a freefall in a jet. She lost all relative positioning. The feeling of the rotation of the rock beneath her was foreign. She couldn't tell where the sun was, couldn't tell if the rock at her back had turned so they were beneath it, so that it was pushing them down. It was like one of those rollercoasters, built indoors and in total darkness, so that you had no idea which direction you would be pulled next. The dusty fog grew darker as they fell, and she squeezed her eyes shut, squeezed Daniel's hand.

They struck something hard and sharp, that gave way like a glass coffeetable. A moment passed which reminded her of the weightless drifting of space. Then a frigid wave enveloped her, shocking and silent. For a brief moment she thought it was an empty void, it was death. She opened her mouth to speak, to shout, and it filled immediately. It wasn't ash this time.

They'd reached the river.

With that realization she suddenly understood the building pain in her ears. She brought her left hand up to her nose, pushing air into her inner ear to equalize pressure. They were at least fifteen feet down, then. She kicked her feet experimentally, felt the rock dragging across the heel of her boot. It was sinking quickly, and not only moving down but to her left. The river was a fairly major body of water, she recalled it fed the entire city and in some places was almost two miles across. The current was swift, and it carried them away from the falling rocks.

It also did nothing to bring her closer to the surface.

She blinked her eyes quickly, trying to see in the murk. The dirt of the landslide had muddied the water considerably, and she had long ago lost any sense of up. Daniel's arm was still miraculously around her shoulder, her lifeless right arm still clinging precariously to his wrist. She couldn't turn her head enough to see his face, he was quickly drifting behind her rather than beside her.

There was no way she could kick her boots off, make them any more buoyant. She hadn't even gotten a good breath before they'd hit the water.

It rolled through her head, as clearly as though the training had been earlier that day. Stop. Breathe. Think. Act.

She couldn't hit step two. She'd remembered raising her hand, asking their instructor in a joking manner what they should do if their air was gone, and they couldn't get past number two.

He'd smiled, one corner of his mouth, one eye crinkling. "Then you surface. Decompression sickness is curable. Drowning isn't."

Sam opened her eyes wide, and hummed, sending a small stream of bubbles from between her lips.

The bubbles drifted quite pointedly directly to her right, and she realized that she was parallel with the ground, her left side being dragged down by Daniel's weight.

With a few kicks she righted them, humming again. This time the bubbles went more or less past her nose, past her eyes, and above her hairline. Up was now up.

She kicked for all she was worth, noting that the surface wasn't that much more bright than the water around her. But there was no pain in her ears, she hadn't needed to swallow to change the pressure. With their weight, she wasn't even rising that much faster than her bubbles. Not that she needed to worry about their ascent rate. Her last breath had been at the surface. At least the situation couldn't be further complicated with nitrogen bubbles in their blood.

While her right leg had been too weak for walking, it proved to be up to swimming, and her head broke the surface before she'd even realized she'd reached it. Sam gasped in a breath, immediately plunging underwater as her lungs emptied. It always took the body a few seconds to adjust to buoyancy changes. Her held breath and feet got her above the surface again. She took another breath, choking and coughing. She couldn't get a deep enough breath to keep herself fully on the surface, and every cough tasted of smoke.

She had to get Daniel out of the water.

She finally released his arm; he didn't even try to hold onto her. The current was washing them very swiftly downstream, she caught a glimpse of treetops at least thirty yards to her back. She snagged his vest with her left hand as he began to drift past her, hauling him up to the surface and rotating 180 degrees so that she was now facing him. She wound her left arm under his left armpit, and then bent her elbow, pushing his head up out of the water. He was heavier than she was, she had to keep her lungs inflated almost constantly in order to keep them both afloat.

She used her right hand to yank the sodden handkerchief off his face, seeing his slack jaw, his mouth half-full of water.

She turned them so her back was once more facing the closest shore, and leaning back, still intertwined with Daniel, she began to kick.

It took a long time. At first she would pick her head up exhaustedly to look, and every glance seemed no closer to the bank than before. For miles at a time they simply drifted along with the river, occasionally being passed by a small sapling. Once a large trunk drifted near to them, and she kicked for it with everything she had, but it sailed past them with yards to spare, and she watched it go for a long time before she tried again.

She adopted a breathing pattern opposite her usual breathe in, breathe out, hold. That worked for above water. Beneath water, with a scuba tank, it was opposite. Breathe out, breathe in, hold. It wasn't so much a hold as it was a pause. It took effort to exhale through a regulator, and reversing the usual pattern of breathing conserved air. In this case, it kept her lungs inflated longer, which made her more buoyant.

It occurred to her they might actually drift into the city before she could get to the shore. Some of the urgency was leaving her, quickly being replaced by shock. It wasn't just physical, either. She didn't have the arm strength to perform mouth to mouth on Daniel, if he were breathing at all. His eyes had closed, perhaps reflexively in the water, and if he were breathing at all, it was through his nose, shallowly, and infrequently.

She didn't let go of him.

It was sudden. There was no noise of water on the banks, she figured it was just more debris. But suddenly her kicking heels touched something solid, and she dared to look behind her.

A few more yards they were dragged downstream, then she and Daniel were swept into a tiny cove, already populated with pieces of tree and vegetation.

She managed to pull them back until their upper torsos were nearly completely out of the water before she slipped, and then the minutes started to tick by.

Need to get out of the water. Get Daniel out of the water.

There wasn't much sunlight left, and she estimated the temperature of the water at 76 degrees. If she hadn't been swimming like she had been, she would have been at risk of hypothermia. She risked it now.

And Daniel had already been in shock, so there was no doubt his body temperature was low. She couldn't tell how low; her fingers were still numb as she slowly and clumsily disentangled herself from him and felt his neck.

He lay nearly across her chest, and she rolled to her side, maneuvering him in the shallow water as best she could. His lips were blue, and the skin beneath his fingernails almost matched the sky. He didn't move, he made no protest as she shoved him further up the bank.

Sam refused to pause. Refused to accept. She knew she wouldn't move again, not once she stopped. She struggled with him, pulling them both back, silently thanking the water for its chilly temperature. Her back was nearly numb, she knew she had to be pulling at the wound but it was nothing more than a blissfully muted ache of cold. Once she had pulled them into solid mud she collapsed against him, and the pressure of her weight on his ribcage caused him to sputter.

And then he took a breath. She heard it clearly.

Sam rolled off his chest and didn't open her eyes again until it was dark.

- . -

There was no audio, and the screen was relatively small and green-tinged. The familiar black mesh lay just behind the glass, was almost invisible if you didn't look too hard. The figures playing beneath that glass were no more than two inches in height, and yet, somehow, their expressions were crystal clear.

The pair had just walked through a double door, and rather than swinging shut behind them he saw the edge of it reappear in the frame. There was a moment in which nothing happened, and then the pair stopped, paused, and unenthusiastically lifted their hands. He watched Carter specifically, watched her visibly contemplate responding with force as three uniformed security guards approached from the fore with their weapons raised. There were some words exchanged, and her chin dropped a fraction. One of the guards came forward and removed their sidearms. He retreated to the safety of his comrades after a pointed look and word from Daniel, and then they turned, a bit more slowly than the guards liked, and reluctantly marched back out of the frame. The last thing on camera was the third security guard, who gazed after them for a moment before returning the way he'd come.

The tape continued for another few seconds before it dissolved into static.

"The rest of the cameras in the building were lost at the same time, sirs." The technician was giving them a fearful look, and O'Neill couldn't temper his expression as he turned to his right. He hated that kind of attitude, it was no better than a dog rolling over and pissing to demonstrate subservience to an alpha male. He was an alpha male, but he didn't want fear. He wanted trust, cooperation, and a lack of kidnapped teammates.

Teal'c was at his shoulder, eyes dark and frown deep. "They meant for their deed to be seen."

"Nothing else?"

"I'm afraid not, sirs. The outside cameras were disabled as well. We're still going over the gate footage to try to spot them leaving the city."

Jack leaned away from the monitor, consciously stopping his hands from ripping off his cap and tearing it in half.

The main recording room, as Conclave mantle Tocker called it, was a large, long, rectangular room about 9 feet wide and the length of two footballs fields laid end to end. The console that had replayed the footage was only about twenty years behind what he would expect to see at home, sort of Colecovision to their Playstation 2. Some of the monitors still used tubes, though newer, less permanent governmental structures they'd seen were using a CRT-like technology. The technicians were lined up against the wall much like the crew of a submarine, each with a large orange headset and eyes only for their string of monitors.

So much security in the damn city and no one knew what the hell was going on.

"I'm afraid they're long gone." The voice was deep, and preceded a giant of a man into the room. At nearly seven feet, it was easy to see why they'd chosen Greer Tocker as their . . . president, of sorts. "I've ordered an evacuation of the city, Colonel. I would suggest the same for your people as well."

The city, Loesh, was large and sprawling, and a Fuhrer-like paranoia had most of the city under surveillance. It was irregularly shaped, the walls protecting it twisted and jutted out in insane angles. It had been ever expanded to meet a growing need for space by the population, and it left a thousand nooks and crannies in which to hide, or to build a hidden door. The Paraclets didn't have the technology or storage required to record everything, which was why so many young men and women sat at their consoles with their right hand ever close to the controls that would, if manually directed, record events. Certain places were recorded at all times, but it would be child's play to leave the city undetected.

The river came immediately to mind.

"Why would you evacuate your city?" Teal'c had taken up the diplomatic position Daniel had so recently left vacant, and Tocker wasn't at all pleased with having to address a Jaffa respectfully, so it suited Jack just fine.

At least the Paraclets hadn't tried to condemn him as a demon. It was just the opposite, actually, though Teal'c's official status as one of God's angels wasn't benefiting them as well as the colonel would have liked.

Nothing about the planet was, come to think of it.

"The city will be destroyed," Tocker responded after a moment, as though explaining shoe-tying to a mentally handicapped child. "The Profates will make your Major Carter integrate the Gods' technology with their own, and they will destroy us. We must evacuate the city."

"See, that's the part I'm not clear on." Jack watched the technician rewind the footage. Just as the door opened behind them, there was part of a hand, just in frame.

He turned to look back – and up – at the Conclave mantle. "You keep all the gouldy junk you can find in one place. Where you do your weapon research. You build the facility outside of the city walls. Far away from the city, in fact. You've got soldiers there, sure, but you've also got scientists, astronomers . . . handymen . . . and you're telling me every one of them down to the last man in loyal to this guy?"

Tocker barely disguised the glare. "As I've indicated to you before, my more conservative stance on our neighbors' –"

"You've lost complete control of the military." He couldn't keep the incredulousness out of his voice. If that were true, the situation was going to turn ugly here. Fast.

And he had two teammates right in the middle of it.

"The city contingent is separate from the Assemblage. Martel was in command of border defenses, military development – everything. But the city forces answer to me." Despite the words Tocker's tone was confident, almost prideful.

He still had control of the local cops. Yay.

"Major Carter and Dr. Jackson will not assist your enemies in destroying you." Teal'c said it flatly.

The Conclave mantle shook his head. "Why do you think they took your Dr. Jackson with them, if not to force her hand? A student of rock and ancient history is of no use to Martel. He will torture Dr. Jackson until your Major agrees. Then he will kill them both."

They didn't even feel it, standing in the room, but an ancient-sounding alarm began to sluggishly ring to their right, and they all glanced that way involuntarily.

"What's that?"

But Tocker had no attention for them. His long stride carried him effortlessly to a desk some fifteen yards to their right, where a young woman stared at a roll of off-white paper as it crawled down the wall into a large box. An arm was scribbling across the paper as it fed out, not unlike the humidity-measuring boxes found in art museums.

By their alarmed looks Jack figured it wasn't a sudden drop in barometric pressure.

"Are you certain?"

The woman nodded, her voice too low to hear.

"B-17!" It was a bark, and one of the technicians – B-17, from the look – bolted out of his chair.

"Yes, Honored mantle!"

"Give me our best view of the Seat, current time."

Jack started over that way, still looking inquiringly at Tocker. The man met his gaze, but shook his head. "It might be nothing. Still . . . no fault for a hundred miles."

No. No fault. Everyone had enemy spies for military generals.

The Seat was the name they had given their research and weapons facility. It had been built thirty miles from the city, originally a fort that could send a signal to the main city that an enemy siege party was approaching. In the briefing, Daniel had explained how they'd come so far as far as weapons were concerned, something about nomadic cultures and too many continents jammed too closely together. What it meant was that they had few major cities on the planet, and had developed missile technology but forgotten the Jet-A. Rather than drill for oil, a precious and rare resource on this planet, they had dared to take goa'uld technology from Babi's abandoned temple.

They'd discovered that staff weapon fuel burned well, but couldn't backwards engineer it. Their attempts had led them to heavily fortify the Seat, triple its size by forming a Pentagon-like ring around the original structure, and research Blowing Stuff Up 101.

Daniel and Carter had gone on the grand tour to determine if the Paraclets had actually discovered and successfully moved the ancient mothership's main power supply – a big honkin' naquadah generator.

Their abduction pretty much indicated that was the case. And apparently, somehow Martel had failed to notify Tocker of their engineering success.

But what could they really do with a generator? Blow themselves up?

. . . unless they'd also transplanted a big honkin' space gun to go with that generator.

Suddenly, evacuating the city didn't seem like such a bad plan.

Tocker hadn't been completely honest with them, but there wasn't much faulting his logic. The pieces fit together like a precision telescope. Evil enemy general infiltrates current sympathetic administration. Evil general plays off current army's disgust with current adminstrations' lack of killing the enemy. Evil general amasses powerful weapons and scientists in secret. A five year shortcut arrives in the city and mentions an aptitude with goa'uld technology and blowing stuff up. Evil general kidnaps five year shortcut, takes to weapons, and forces upgrades.

. . . or maybe evil general got tired of current administrations' lack of killing the enemy, amassed powerful weapons and scientists in secret, nabbed the five year shortcut, and planned to annihilate the enemy.

Why was Tocker so certain Martel intended to use whatever weapons he built on their city, rather than their enemies'?

"That appears to be smoke."

"You speak well, Angel of God."

Jack blinked, bringing his attention to the tiny green screen. It showed a badly zoomed in distance, where an indeterminably wide column of black smoke was rising well above the treetops.

Tocker had asked for a view of the Seat.

"It was a powerful enough explosion to be measured by our seismic detectors," Tocker rumbled, accidentally tearing the delicate scroll of paper in his massive hands. "It must have destroyed half the facility."

"There's more, sir! An aftershock . . . " The technician wasn't able to hide her joy at the news as well as Tocker. "No, more powerful. A second explosion!"

Teal'c turned, and gave O'Neill a long, steady look.

- . -

Her eyes flew open, and for a brief second she had no idea where she was.

The planet P3X-947.

It was temperate, smaller than earth and less spherical, and the main land masses centered near the equator of the planet. Strong magnetic poles made orbital surface scans less effective – it was one of the reasons they considered it a suitable place to establish an off-world base. It was possibly one of the reasons the goa'uld had originally sent human slaves there, roughly 800 years prior to SG-1's visit.

It also lent an odd quality to the iron found on the planet. The indigenous people had already discovered naquadah, as their ancestors had been forced to mine it for a few hundred years. They knew it had been used in the construction of great cities of the gods, and so symbolically had mixed a small amount with the iron found in nearly every hillside. The end result was an extremely strong, durable material that they used to build their own cities.

They'd only had about six hundred years to build their cities, so there weren't too many of them. Five, actually, on the entire planet. Their society had quickly separated between the slaves' original religion and that of worship of their absent goa'uld Babi. Because the major land masses were extremely close and usually linked by at least one land bridge, raids on one another were frequent, and villages quickly found it necessary to build a wall. Once they melted the iron with naquadah and added it to their cement mixture, they discovered that none of their weapons could reshape or move the cured structure, and so nomadic cultures were immediately curbed and large-scale warfare came to the fore much sooner than it normally would have.

And so engineering progressed quickly, and all the while they worked to incorporate the mixture into every weapon they designed, so that it would be hard enough to damage the city walls. Trade, a bit counter-intuitively, flourished under this system, and the planet, while still deeply divided on religious issues, had evolved at a faster pace than Earth.

It was the Paraclet scientists, eager to impress their new 'visitors,' that had led her to test the substance. It was equally impervious to heat and cold, made a wonderful, universal insulator, was nearly as dense as lead – the applications were limitless.

And then, once she got a sample back to the base, on a whim, she placed a tiny amount into a small naquadah reactor.

The iron actually streamlined the energy-releasing process of naquadah. And while it wasn't naquadriah, any substance that made the generators more efficient while remaining stable was worth investigating.

That one moment in time. That whim, that little voice that had said "I wonder . . ." That was where it went wrong.

Daniel hadn't trusted Martel from the start.

She didn't know why she'd ignored him. Too much time with Colonel O'Neill.

It was easier than admitting she had dismissed his unenthusiastic comment because she felt he was unfairly prejudiced against the military.

She shivered, coming more fully awake. Even knowing it was probably almost 80, 'temperate' had never seemed so cold. The sky was brightly lit above her, and the trees were utterly still, as though to make up for their misbehavior earlier.

Earlier.

Daniel.

She experimentally deepened her breathing, fighting the urge to cough. Moving only slightly sent a thousand tiny spasms down the length of her spine. Her limbs were stiff, her throat sore.

But she was finally alert. Her brain no longer felt sluggish. For the first time, she looked around and saw.

They had washed ashore in a little natural cove, surrounded on three sides by deciduous forest. They'd managed to worm their way into a small clearing of sorts, a low area she expected flooded in the spring and during rains. The nearest trunks were slender and the growth new and slow. The larger trees, farther from the banks, leaned out over them so that the nearly full twin moons dappled silver light over them exactly like the sun had. The moons made more than enough light for someone accustomed to only one, and it was easy to see that this was a fairly secluded cove. There was no noise of vehicles, no faint murmur of civilization, and the river passed nearly silently at her feet.

They'd traveled many miles from the weapons facility. There was no way to tell just how far; she could see the night sky on her right was glowing a little with the light of the city, but it was certainly miles. Part of her considered riding the river all the way. They could use the debris, tie a few trees together and float into the city.

Something. A vehicle. There was no way she was going to be able to carry Daniel. Not without help.

She turned her head, her damp hair grinding against the dirt and her neck vertebrae crinkling like crumpled paper. He was still beside her, and his face was tilted towards her. His eyes were closed, and the moonlight fell across his exposed throat. She could see the smudges of soot where she'd grabbed for a pulse, and it didn't look as though he'd moved.

But there was a slight quiver, a tiny shadow on his throat. There. And again.

A pulse.

"So it was a bad plan." Only the first word was audible; the rest was just breath passing over smoke-coated vocal chords. She coughed, a wet and rattling cough, and spent a long time catching her breath. It didn't rouse him.

Needed a plan. Needed to get them warm. Needed to get him medical attention. She still didn't even know the extent of his injuries, and they could only have been made worse by the landslide, the fall, the water –

Sam took a calming breath, staring at the two breathtaking moons. It was past. They survived.

She just had to make sure they stayed that way.

Tying logs together was out of the question. She didn't have the strength to stand, much less latch thousand-pound cylinders of wood together. She had no material to lash them together with. She had no way of diverting wood of acceptable size into the cove.

She needed a better plan.

Radio.

Range was a problem, with the magnetic properties of the planet, but they'd made some adjustments to boost signal as they'd 'toured' some of the outer-city government facilities. She groped at her still-sodden vest, the pocket on the top left. Her radio was still inside; base security could think of no valid reason to request her to remove it during the tour, and they had never left her alone to use it during her imprisonment.

She freed it, not daring to hope, and held it above her face, in a ray of moonlight. It was readily evident that the electronics had had it. The top of the radio was actually malformed, slightly melted, and despite the fact it was waterproof, it did not power on.

The adjustments wouldn't have done it. It boosted signal while the radio was transmitting, not passively receiving. The battery couldn't be drained. Maybe there was debris between the connectors. She fumbled with it, turning it over and trying to release the battery, but her fingers were too stiff with cold and burns to force the tiny black lever. She fought with it a moment, hissing with frustration, and sacrificed a fingernail to get the damn thing to slide.

The battery dropped with a muted thud on her chest, and she picked it up awkwardly, turning it over in a handy moonbeam.

It was clean, and the contacts were intact. Forcing the battery back into the unit didn't improve the performance. No power.

She held it a moment more, then let it drop at her side. Worthless. No power, no GPS tracking. No signal of any kind.

It wasn't as though she had any tools to repair it with anyway. She couldn't solder a dual-layer board. Maybe Daniel's was in better shape.

She lay still a moment, the thought echoing through her head but her body lacking motivation. A few more deep breaths and then she rolled towards him. It was hard work to tug his wet vest across his chest, and harder work to get into the pocket. She kept feeling around, trying to close her fingers on it, but it seemed to be somehow attached to the vest.

With a grunt of effort she finally turned the pocket inside out. She had been grabbing the inner seam of the pocket; his radio was gone.

Sam dropped her head down into the mud, fighting back an overwhelming surge of despair.

She needed a plan.

He'd made it this far.

There was still a chance.

She wiped at her face angrily with a muddy hand, taking another look around their new prison. There was wood. She couldn't vouch for how much of it was dry enough to burn, but they needed heat, even if she spent the night keeping it alive.

"Hang on. I'll be right back."

Motivating herself to actually get up was significantly harder than it had originally seemed. Everything hurt. Her right side was getting less responsive, rather than more, and she knew sleeping on her back had only allowed fluid to drain to the wound, which was already swollen. It might be interfering with her sciatic nerve, might just be swelling. Standing was almost impossible; if not for the plethora of stable things to lean on, she would have had to gather on her hands and knees.

As it was it took her the better part of a half-hour to find anything remotely suitable, and none of it was ideal. The woods were seasonally swept of their growth and sheddings by the river every spring, so only one years' worth of dead wood was available. She was able to hang onto the load under her left arm, bouncing from tree to tree with her numbed right shoulder.

There were only a few rocks in the general area of their LZ, as it were, but she determined the ground was wet enough to prevent the fire from getting out of control. She hemmed in the starter material with the larger, wetter logs – they could dry and then be added to the fire as necessary.

It occurred to her she had nothing to start a fire with. They'd left most of the supplies back in the boarding house when they'd started their 'tour.' It hadn't occurred to her in an industrialized city to carry her field supplies.

It hadn't occurred to her that they'd be kidnapped and forced to write an interface between the technology of the indigenous people and the technology the goa'uld had left behind, either. That had been a rather nasty surprise.

Sam choked back a bitter laugh, shivering with the effort. God, she was losing it. No rations, either. No water. She cast her gaze around the clearing, hoping for inspiration but finding only the discarded radio. She stared at it consideringly for a moment. It returned her gaze, a little dubiously.

What the hell. She couldn't use it for signaling in the usual way, but . . .

Five minutes later found her bent over the small mound of dried grasses and dead ivy and twigs, her backup knife in one hand and the battery of the radio in the other. The casing wasn't aluminum, not in the specialty units' gear, and it made a fairly decent shower of sparks as she briskly stripped the battery. If necessary she'd use the acid, but she was hoping it would catch without it. No sense in breathing in any more toxic smoke in one day than she had to –

A tiny flame caught, and with ten minutes' careful attention, she soon had some of the smaller but more robust pieces of wood hissing and smoldering. Too wet for full-fledged fire, but hot enough that it wasn't going to go out anytime soon.

She was still cold, but a little less numb, and she dared to feel her back, feel around the wound. The metal had cut through her vest and burned away some of the fabric. The skin there felt oddly hard to her, as though more metal surrounded the wound, but she knew better than to pick. It was cauterized. A soak in an unfamiliar river teeming with unknown organisms hadn't helped it.

She could count on her physical condition to worsen considerably in the next twelve hours.

What about Daniel's.

His eyes were open again; it was a fairly new development, she'd checked on him again as soon as she'd returned to their impromptu campsite. He was staring upwards, this time, idly taking in the night sky, and she moved closer to him, stroking his cheek with the back of her fingers.

"Daniel?"

He responded more to the touch than her voice, his eyes shifted slightly in her direction.

"Daniel, can you hear me?"

His lips parted as his jaw cracked open, but his Adam's apple, chiseled against his moondrenched throat, didn't so much as quiver.

"Does it hurt anywhere?"

Concussion. At the least. Shearing in his brain was possible too. It depended how hard they got thrown against the far wall in the initial blast. There wasn't a damn thing she could do about either, and she choked down a sizable lump in her throat.

"You're . . . just take it easy."

The firelight helped add a little color to the burnished moonlight. Without that yellow and orange tinge, on a black and green uniform, it would have been impossible to tell if moisture was blood. His uniform was in fair shape; his black canvas vest had had it. She left it unbuckled but didn't strip it; he'd need it for heat. Beneath it the cotton overshirt was still intact, and beneath that his grey cotton undershirt was still damp, but finally she detected the first signs of body heat warming him.

Check him for injuries, then keep him near the fire.

It was a plan.

She ran her hands lightly over his throat, knowing if it had been broken he would have died before she'd hauled them out of the facility. His standard archeological headwear had protected his hair and scalp from burns – it occurred to her to check her own head, and just as suddenly she decided she didn't want to know. His shoulders seemed okay, and she tried to be extra gentle on his chest, knowing she was pushing harder than she might ordinarily have needed to so that she could actually feel.

Nothing. No broken ribs. Nothing blocking his windpipe. Collapsed lung, maybe? Why was it so hard for him to breathe –

She touched his abdomen, just beneath his sternum, where his diaphragm was still working to pull air into his lungs. It was just a touch.

He didn't cry out, but his eyes darkened, his face crumpled slightly, and he blinked.

It hit her harder than a full-fledged scream.

"I'm sorry, Daniel, I'm sorry –"

She touched it as little as possible, ever so carefully rolling up his undershirt. The skin there wasn't unusually bruised, but the swelling, the hardness, and the tightly stretched skin were classic signs of subcutaneous hemorrhaging. If not blood, some fluid had gathered there, and it wasn't giving his diaphragm any room to work.

He was slowly suffocating.

She probed the swelling as gently as she possibly could, noting it was slightly worst to his left side. There was no way to know whether it was internal bleeding, and no way to treat. She didn't even have a first aid kit.

Sam choked back another lump and tried to assume a neutral expression. Not that she was sure he could see it.

"It's okay. You're going to be okay." She shied away from the injury, making a cursory check of his lower stomach and hips before steeling herself for his legs.

Amazingly, they were intact, though he had huge eggs on the tops of his shins where the beam had initially lain, and the uniform there had been burned almost completely away. She followed his shins down to his ankles, both a little swollen, and from there down to his left foot, knowing it was probably crushed. The beam had come to rest on the bridge of his foot, and boot or no boot, bones would be broken. His sock was nearly dry, and she rolled it down, taking great pains and glancing back at Daniel's face to judge the level of pain she was causing him.

He didn't blink again, but he swallowed, a long and difficult-sounding process, and it seemed to take him an age to take another breath.

"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry-" The skin was badly bruised, and a little blood seeped from a place it appeared the skin had just given. It was no worse than an open sore, and she carefully rolled the sock back up. It was the driest thing on either of them, and the best she could do for it.

"It's okay, Daniel. It's okay." She kept talking to him, her mouth kept moving as she wrestled with her vest. She almost dropped it in the fire when she finally scraped it over her right shoulder, and she laid it quite close to the flame, on top of the wettest piece of large wood she had found. It would dry, she needed it dry for heat.

She could make him comfortable. She could keep him warm. Let him know he wasn't alone.

God, of all the times to be wrong –

Sounds tumbled out of her mouth. She couldn't hear them, wasn't sure they were even words. She crawled around him, carefully turning him towards the fire, so slowly. Always watching his eyes, watching his face. When he was as close as she dared roll him, she laid as closely behind him as possible. She wrapped her arms around his upper chest and pulled herself closer to his back. She kept her legs pressed up behind his, supporting him, warming him as best she could.

"They'll . . . see the fire by UAV. They'll be here in the morning, Daniel. We just have to . . . have to keep warm. Just till morning."

He wouldn't make it to morning. Even if she kept him on his side, let the fluid drain a little, there wasn't much hope.

There hadn't been much to start.

She thought she'd accepted this, but now that she lay beside him, held him in her arms, suddenly it wasn't okay anymore. Nothing was worth this. Her right lower eyelid began to twitch, and she clenched them closed hard, compressed her entire face.

Never again. Not to him.

Never to him.

He was staring again, marveling at some point between the small, stuttering fire and the moons that gazed down upon them so unsympathetically, so detachedly. He watched them back, impassively, and she curled herself around him, and pressed her cheek against the side of his head. And wept. And watched him watch until he wasn't watching anymore.

- . -

Teal'c didn't acknowledge him, continuing to watch the small screen as miles of dark green blobs passed beneath the UAV. They had tied the UAV's feed into the MALP system, which was the only piece of equipment they'd brought with sufficient power to detect the radio signals at this distance. The further from the ground they were generated, the less magnetic distortion, but they were still only going to have enough battery for two more sweeps of the general area. The first lap had been done with the infrared camera, getting damage assessment.

It hadn't been good. The facility had originally been coated with the Paraclet's unique polymer, which had hidden it completely when they'd first surveyed the 50 mile area outside the stargate. Now nearly all of it was readily visible to the UAV. Massive structural damage had been done to all rings of the Seat. Considering many of the materials used to build the facility had contained raw, unrefined naquadah, it was miraculous that the overload of the generator hadn't caused a chain reaction that had left nothing more than a slightly radioactive crater a mile in diameter.

It begged the question of what had caused the explosion in the first place. And whether Major Carter and Daniel Jackson had been in the facility at the time.

"What view is that? It isn't like the first one."

Teal'c didn't move, or answer. It hadn't been a question.

The man – Ferin, was his name – was the city contingent guard that had been assigned to them. He seemed competent enough, though easily distracted. He had not volunteered to follow Colonel O'Neill after his argument with General Hammond, and had allowed the colonel to storm away without so much as a hesitant protest.

While it didn't speak to his courage, it did indicate he wasn't as unintelligent as he had first seemed.

It wasn't as thought the gates to the city weren't locked down for the night. Once the Seat had been destroyed, the order to evacuate had been rescinded, and Conclave mantle Tocker had even been so kind as to offer the hand of cooperation, should they wish to retaliate against the Profates for the abduction and death of their teammates.

He had no doubt that the heated discussion which had passed just inches outside of his hearing had concerned that subject in great detail. It was unfortunate that Ferin had cropped up during General Hammond's orders concerning the continuation of their mission, and spoken over the distorted radio communication, drowning out the general's words.

And until the colonel's return or another communication from Stargate command, he would continue under the supposition that they were to locate and rescue their missing teammates.

"How is it the fixed wing vehicle is able to see on so many levels? Are they gelled lenses fitted over the camera?"

Teal'c raised an eyebrow marginally. Those, unfortunately, were questions.

"The UAV is equipped with many types of cameras."

Ferin seemed to consider the response 'smashing the ice' and moved an inch or two closer.

"What does this display show?"

He was indicating the altitude monitor.

"The altitude of the UAV."

"And this one? What does it show . . . oh. Power, I bet. That's amazing. And it's been flying for some time."

Ferin trailed off, and Teal'c switched the UAV to detailed mapping mode. It caused the equipment to send out sonar waves, giving him some indication of underground caves and other structures. It wasn't quite as advanced as some of the other functions, but given that the resin they coated the Seat in had been undetectable by radar, by straight recording, and by heat, his choices for locating any other buildings so camouflaged were limited.

It was going to waste a lot of power. He modified the UAV's pattern with the laptop interface, glancing at the time as he did so.

He figured the planet was on a 26 hour day, and mentally adjusted the number of hours until daylight.

"I . . . I heard that your friends were there."

Not a question.

A long silence, showing occasion, oddly shaped orange pockets over the dark green on the MALP screen.

"You're looking for them, aren't you."

He assumed that was self-evident, but it was worth an answer.

"I am."

"Maybe they weren't there at all. The Profates have the same shielding resin we do, you know." A quiet grumble. "Stole it from us, more like."

Five hours til daylight. They'd probably have slightly less than that before General Hammond made contact again.

"It's almost impossible to find them, even if you walk right up to 'em," Ferin was continuing. "We'd cover the city in one, but of course the Profates know where it is. And this being the capitol, there's no real reason to hide." He tried to add a confident note, which fell a little flat at the end.

"And how do you know the Profates have utilized this technology, if you cannot locate their facilities?" He didn't mean it quite as accusatorily as it sounded.

"Oh, you have to find the exhaust pipes," Ferin replied knowledgably. "The air is cooled before it's released, so you can't find them with heat-sensitive equipment, but the temperature difference is what it is. They disguise the pipes like dead trees, so you just look for the dead trees, and if you get a brush of really cool air? You know there's one nearby."

Teal'c began toggling through options on the MALP.

"We have them all over the place," Ferin was continuing. "All the smaller arms to deal with siege armies are hidden in little bunkers out in the lands between the cities. We build fake ones from time to time. I'm sure they ran into one of ours and that's where they stole the technology from."

"And you believe General Martel was one of these . . . Profates?"

"Well, yeah, I guess." Ferin's voice lost some of its surety. Possibly this topic was treasonous, but Teal'c wasn't concerned that Ferin would lie to him. One of the 'perks' of being considered an angel to the Paraclet's religion was that they fully believed he would know if they lied. They also believed he had the power to smite them apparently simply by thinking it.

He didn't even recall Babi's jaffa army, and could not remember their mark. They had a great reputation on this planet, but it clearly had ended there.

"If your leader believed him to be a spy, why was he allowed to keep his position?"

Ferin shifted a little uncomfortably, and Teal'c cursed himself for pressing too hard. The last thing he wanted was the idiot to try to find something else of interest to do.

"In our lands, if there is suspicion of loyalty, it is brought up in a court and evidence is presented to determine the truth. Is there no such process in your culture?"

"Oh! You mean Council." His tone was a little less guarded. "Yeah, actually one of the contingent took him to Council a few years ago for treason, but no one stepped forward to give the Vow, so the Council blessed him."

Teal'c assumed that meant he was found not guilty.

"I . . . the contingent doesn't have much use for the Assemblage, you understand, but there's only so many waterholes in the city . . . his men talk about him like he lives to protect the city. You know. That's why he convinced the Conclave mantle to open up the vaults and start trying to use the stuff of the Gods." Oddly, the young man was staring at his feet, as though ashamed.

"We don't have any need to meddle with it. Those are weapons for gods' wars, not for men. They were meant for you. For angels," he added, as though Teal'c might misunderstand. "We've never destroyed a city. Neither have the Profates. If we used the weapons of the gods . . . well, I guess there wouldn't be a contingent anymore."

Teal'c leaned back, letting the new preset run on the UAV, and turned his head to watch Ferin in his peripheral vision.

"You are wise. The weapons of which you speak have brought nothing to death to all that wield them. Doubtless weapons like them destroyed the ship that once carried Babi." The name carried with it a brief memory of an inscription in Apophis' main chambers, something about the defeat of a vicious foe.

"Those weapons can destroy the gods?"

Teal'c suppressed a sigh. It was going to be a long night.

"Be seated, and I will tell you of the battles of your 'gods'."

- . -

She'd lied to him.

She knew they'd see the smoke, if not record the explosion. If the third blast had been sufficient to trigger a landslide, they'd have felt it or at least heard it in the main city. And she knew the colonel would send a message to General Hammond, and Stargate Command would launch the UAV. The small fire she'd built would show up as a bright white spot to the heat-sensitive equipment, and their bodies closer to yellows and oranges.

What she had assumed would take all the time was the actual arrival. As far as she could tell there were no nearby roads, so the Paraclets' odd WWII-like jeeps wouldn't be a viable method of extraction. The forest was thick, and they had not progressed to rotating wing aircraft. Their fixed-wing craft wasn't that advanced either, allowing them only short-range surveillance. She wasn't even certain they had heat-sensitive equipment. With the amount of debris in the river and its swift current, it would be nearly impossible for even an expert boatman to navigate a sufficiently large ship to them until the worst of it had passed and their harbor had been unclogged.

It was why she hadn't moved them any further from the shore. She wanted to be visible to their boats.

But she hadn't dared to believe that they would get to her before dawn.

There was no mistaking it, though. It had the same whine all their electric engines did, constantly sounding badly tuned and hemorrhaging power inefficiently. Often electric engines emitted a pitch not unlike the whirring wings of a small insect. This sounded closer to an ancient horsehair bow, loosely strung, being pulled across the coarse, rusty strings of a cheap violin. It was soft, and far-off, but there was no mistaking it for anything else.

Sam picked up her head, surprised at how stiff her neck had gotten. Daniel's hair had glued itself to her face somehow; it cracked the dried tears on her cheeks as it pulled away. She would guesstimate the sound was about 30 yards away.

Then it died quite suddenly, and for a moment all she could hear was the deep, barely audible thumping of some small, uprooted trees that had washed into their cove.

She knew it might take them a moment to spot them. Their fire had dipped quite low, and she hadn't gotten up to rekindle it. It would have required her to let Daniel go.

And she wasn't ready to do that.

She opened her mouth, to yell, to let them know where she was, but she couldn't make more than a whisper. She'd talked herself hoarse to Daniel a few hours ago.

His eyes hadn't closed, hadn't even half-lidded. She'd had to reach around, pull them shut like the windowshades that kept afternoon light from waking a napping child. She was protecting his corneas from the drying heat of the fire.

He was in a coma, but he was still breathing. Sometimes she could even hear it.

Any real estimation of time had become impossible, it had ceased to have any meaning as long as she'd been lying there. Eventually, or maybe gradually, the boat became visible, floating downstream silently. It was about twenty feet, little more than a pontoon boat with a permanent captain's box, but more than big enough to get them back to the city. She could see shapes aboard, in the British-like uniforms of the Paraclets, leaning over the starboard railings, watching the bank intently.

Sam's stomach clenched, and she began to slowly disentangle herself from Daniel. He didn't respond, and she crouched by him a moment more, to confirm he was still breathing.

There was no way to know if these were city guards, or militia guards. And they were almost on top of her.

And they had flashlights. There was a shout, an arm silhouetted in the setting moonlight. They'd been spotted.

There was another shout as the boat thumped loudly against some of the debris that had gathered in their cove, and then splashes and footsteps, pairs of legs sloshing through the shallows to them. She stood quietly, not even bothering to run. If they were the militia guards, they'd easily catch her. Better to appear stronger than she was. Better to be on her feet.

They pinned her in multiple beams of surprisingly bright flashlights, circling the campsite without directly approaching her.

Her right leg was shaking a little, and she lowered that hip, pushing the leg harder against the ground.

It was Martel's men, then.

"I had a feeling you'd survived, Major Carter."

It was as though he'd reached over and flicked up a lightswitch. Instant rage coursed through her body. Stiffness relaxed. Soreness vanished. Strength seared through every chilled bone.

One of the flashlights dropped a bit lower, focusing on Daniel, and she could make out Martel's face.

He'd seen better days. A sticky white strip of what looked a little like Elmer's glue held together a gash on his forehead, there was a deep purple bruise on his right cheekbone, and his eyebrows were no longer symmetrical. He had been fastidiously groomed the first time she'd seen him, and it had been apparent that his appearance was very important.

They'd just begun their first official meeting with Tocker when the door had quietly but confidently opened, and a uniformed officer had entered, pausing to close the doors behind him.

He turned, meeting the eyes of everyone at the table. "Forgive my intrusion. I am Martel, general of the Assemblage and overseer of research in the Seat."

Sam had been almost certain O'Neill was going to take the last phrase and run with it, but he surprised her by beaming at the newcomer in an almost friendly way.

"Colonel O'Neill, leader of SG-1 and overseer of . . fishing."

Martel's eyebrows raised. She couldn't help but notice they were perfectly shaped, a distinguished grey, like the rest of his hair. His face was otherwise completely clean-shaven, and every piece of leather on his uniform, from his soft-soled boots to his collar-pin, was shining in the bright sunlight. He was every inch a disciplined solider, at least in appearance.

Daniel moved subtly in her peripheral vision, and his Fuhrer comment came to mind, unbidden.

Okay. So these Paraclets leaned a little towards the military. Considering what they'd learned just from the startled worshippers they'd interrupted, it was to be expected.

"What a great mind you must have, leading both exploration of other planets as well as a facet of your economic and agricultural industries."

The colonel had gotten that glazed look, nodded vaguely, and agreed, and the two of them regarded one another a moment more before the Conclave mantle Tocker cleared his throat delicately. At nearly seven feet, gently was relative.

"I'm certain our new friends must be exhausted from their journeys."

"Actually, the Stargate allows us to travel almost instantaneously across the vast distances between stars." She just couldn't help herself; here was a culture almost as advanced as industrial Earth and they were going to start those baby steps Stargate command had begun nine short years ago. "The trip from Earth to here only took about seven seconds."

The Conclave mantle – both the religious and governmental leader of the Paraclets – looked stunned. "I . . .am sure our scientists would be eager to hear more about your travels through the doorway of the gods. Please, forgive our initial response. It has been . . . six hundred years or more since our city was graced by the visitation of an angel."

The first thing she noted was that he didn't look particularly pleased about it. The second thing was the fact he had said 'visitation of an angel.'

Surely he wasn't referring to . . .?

"Ah, what?" The colonel had cocked his head in a calm, polite manner, but his tone had gotten a little tighter.

Tocker blinked, then indicated – Teal'c?

"Your companion. He is an angel of the Gods. It is said his kind showed Man the way through the door, and when Man refused to return at God's command, He sent the angels to punish them."

So much for not being considered a demon.

"In our writings, it is said the angels took the form of demons and animals to hide their tears as they smote Man." Martel sounded almost . . . irreverent? "I am certain their task was distasteful to them."

Teal'c lessened his scowl with effort and was silent.

Jack suddenly clapped his hands. "Well, you folks have just been great. And I'm sure we have a lot of things to discuss."

The Conclave mantle seemed to catch on. "Of course. Please, accept our hospitality. Access to all our government facilities is yours. We are humbled by your visit –"

Martel looked distinctly unhappy about the mantle's words, but hid the expression quickly as he noticed her gaze. He nodded to her, almost imperceptibly, and she flashed him a quick smile.

Well, she'd hesitated when General Hammond had all but given Hathor a key to the missile silo -

Then again, Hathor had been a gould, drugging them, and trying to take over the planet. She could hardly blame this general for feeling the same caution regarding them.

Blame. She could blame him now for much more than that.

"But it looks as though there was a little snag. Did you miscalculate?"

She faced him, unafraid, as he strode up to her. They were nearly the same height, and with the flashlight further out of her eyes she could see that he was slightly favoring one leg.

It wasn't inconceivable that he had survived, if they had. It was just a bitterly, bitterly disappointing.

She never even saw him move. Bright white fractals danced behind her lids, and she found herself sprawled on the hard, wet ground. Her jaw was numb, and tingling more than slightly, and there was a taste of blood in her mouth.

"I don't know whether you meant to destroy the entire facility or just create a diversion, Major Carter, but you have succeeded in killing thousands this day."

She blinked a few times, orienting herself, and then picked herself up off the ground. She hadn't gotten farther than a half-pushup before he struck her again, at the top of the shoulders.

"Oh, it's true," he continued darkly, "the Assemblage soldiers had the option of keeping their families within the Seat, for protection. Those dorms were beneath the main structure. I suspect some of them survived the initial explosion, and either burned to death or suffocated in the smoke before they were permanently interred."

It wasn't true. She'd seen the plans of the facility, there'd been no subterranean structures of the size needed to barrack entire families.

It wasn't true.

"So congratulations for aiding our enemy," he murmured, almost softly. "Every man with me lost a loved one this day. And . . . I see you have, as well." His beam was still centered on Daniel's face, and she tried again, to get up.

This time he let her.

"So you understand the price of your decision now, don't you."

She brought a hand up to touch her throbbing jaw gingerly, and bared her teeth at him.

"Do you?" Rage and shock almost blinded her, but she found the strength to force her voice to be audible. It was harsh, and sharp, and she liked it. "You've failed. Earth won't attack the Profates in retaliation for our kidnapping. They'll come to you."

"Yes, and you so gallantly risked your own life and the life of your comrade to destroy any chance of us effectively defending ourselves." He turned his back on her, pacing unhurried around the small clearing.

He was wasting time. And it seriously bothered her.

"I have a proposition for you, Major Carter. Will you hear it?"

She spat out a small amount of blood, but didn't speak. He was probably going to kill her. She had no weapon, no dexterity, and could barely stand. Her position wasn't great. Once she'd blown up the generator she'd pretty much played all the cards in her hand. Unless he had another goa'uld generator lying around, she was now worthless as anything but a hostage.

Unless he wanted Stargate addresses . . . ? She could think of a few lovely ones off the top of her head –

"Not all the technology we recovered from the Temple was stored in the Seat," he began, almost thoughtfully. "It was too great a risk, not when the location of the Seat was so well-known. Among those objects still intact is an artifact of great interest." He stopped about five feet away, and regarded her.

"It's roughly eight feet in length, four feet in height, three feet again wide. It's covered in unusual symbols, gilded, and it has the most amazing restorative properties. Ah, I see from your expression you've come across such an object in your travels."

A sarcophagus. He had a sarcophagus.

Or he was lying.

Or she already blew it up.

"We haven't done extensive testing on the device, of course, as it's impractical as a weapon. However, given that we may now be fighting a war on two fronts, I suspect we will need to know the extent of its abilities before long."

He looked pointedly at Daniel.

"Dr. Jackson is going to become our new testing subject. Once he is restored to full health, we'll see to what extent the device can repair cellular trauma. Bruises, torn ligaments, nothing too serious. Then, we'll see how it deals with lacerations. Broken bones. Disease."

Another step towards her.

"Now, if you were to offer me something . . . more valuable than research into this technology, there would be no reason to continue it."

Weapons. He wanted weapons technology.

And he probably wasn't going to let her blow it up this time.

"It would take too long to backwards engineer goa'uld . . . technology on this planet, Martel. Your technology isn't advanced enough."

"Yes, and it's unlikely your military will trade it for only two hostages." He frowned exaggeratedly, as though just noticing a flaw in a perfect plan. "If only all the gods' weapons hadn't been stored and researched in the Seat, then we wouldn't have to backwards engineer anything."

She'd wondered why she hadn't seen the auxiliary port stabilizer in their collection. She'd just assumed some of the components were damaged during the dismantling phase.

Oh.

He had crossed his arms across his chest and was waiting quietly, the sarcasm dripping off his face to soak into the moist earth at their feet.

"You want me to cobble together . . . a weapon from broken parts?" She tried to snort, but it came out quite different.

"You will. And the longer it takes you to give us results, the longer Dr. Jackson will have to serve with us to repay your debt."

She was grabbed roughly from behind – the guards had long ago encircled their camp. Her right leg gave and she let it, letting her weight become dead. The guard grunted as he was forced to support her, but in the end, it only briefly delayed the inevitable. Two of the soldiers grabbed Daniel, one at the feet and the other at his shoulders, carried him over the shallows, and unceremoniously dumped him on the side of the flatboat.

They were less gentle with her.

- . -

Five of them, Assemblage. He could see their insignia brightly reflecting the light of their electric torches. Could have been Maglites for the amount of light they were giving off, and they were nearly two feet long. A sixth man had just stiffly jumped into the water, and he reached up slowly, carefully adjusting the sight.

It had been a long time since he'd had a reason to touch the Leopold scope.

Whoever the sixth man was, he was the right build, had the right hair. He stepped onto the bank, and O'Neill briefly left him to scan the rest of the clearing again.

No one's position had changed. He watched Carter shift her weight, digging her right leg into the dirt. Jackson still hadn't stirred. The small fire was doing a good job of hiding detail, and in the white light of those blasted moons everything looked drained of color. No way to tell if he was sleeping, injured, dead.

Damn moons were a covert ops' worst nightmare.

Martel approached the pair, focusing first on Carter, then Daniel. He eventually closed the distance between them, dropping the flashlight out of her eyes and speaking. He winced as he saw the blow prepared, saw Carter do nothing. Martel used the cylinder of the flashlight like a billyclub, nailed her jaw. Not glancing, but not debilitating.

She hadn't even flinched, and she went down hard.

Martel didn't give her a chance to get up, either, and followed his first attack with a strike across the back of her neck.

"Come on, Carter . . ."

He relaxed his extended index finger, and curled it gently into the trigger cage. She wouldn't normally take a beating like that sitting down. He didn't want to risk them in a firefight, but he wasn't going to watch her beaten to death.

Martel went back to Jackson, his expression too difficult to read from the side, and after a long pause, Carter pulled it together and got her feet under her. She spat – blood, maybe lost a tooth – and then showed her teeth.

"That's my girl."

Martel was talking again, though most his attention seemed to be on Jackson. Teal'c had said two warm bodies, so Daniel couldn't be dead. But he still hadn't so much as twitched a nostril. Carter answered Martel, but her demeanor was less challenging, and her gaze kept returning to Daniel. Not submissive, but definitely considering.

O'Neill left his index finger where it was.

He had no doubt that the rifle, a Knights Mk11 Mod 0, would be up to the task. He'd not used it in the field for more than five years, but together they'd seen every kind of environment imaginable. The water wasn't going to be a problem; she'd still be as deadly accurate as she'd been when he'd disassembled her and stuffed her into the locker under his second spare uniform. Still, even with the match suppressor he wasn't sure he'd get more than two shots off before his position was blown. There were still several targets on the boat itself, and any one of them could pick off Carter or Daniel in retaliation.

Then again, he might not get another opportunity like this one.

At no point did Carter nod or agree, but Martel had clearly made up his mind. He signaled, and the circle of guards closed in. They grabbed Carter and she went limp, but apparently didn't have the strength or the position to take advantage. Jackson was hauled to the boat like a sack of manure and dumped, and away from the firelight, Jack was able to get a better look at him. Uniform was in pieces, and one of his boots was missing, but there was no visible injury besides dirt.

He swung back to Carter. The guards were predictably disgusted with her stalling tactics and dumped her in the river. It was really too shallow for her to swim away without being seen, and she didn't try. One of the guards grabbed her roughly by her hair as she surfaced, and he noted it was a little shorter than he'd remembered.

Christ. They must have been caught in one of the explosions.

Jack clenched his jaw and watched as she was dragged back to the boat, and suddenly there was splashing and the boat was in his line of sight.

Jack cursed quietly, didn't move a muscle, and continued to watch.

After a twenty or thirty second struggle Carter was thrown onto the floor of the barge, waterlogged, and the two guards also climbed aboard. One was clutching his face, and his hand was dripping with an inky black liquid.

Then they started up their engine.

Jack watched a moment more before he carefully straightened his index finger, laying it gently against the barrel of the rifle, and set it aside, glancing over the heap of grasses that hid him. He waited until they were nearly half a league upriver, and then he slowly, methodically wormed his way backwards.

Despite being a generally land-lubbing folk, they built decent fishing boats. He'd pinched the smallest, it was really nothing more than a kayak with a bucket built into it, and was surprisingly maneuverable. It had a small electric engine on the back, which he'd use if they got too far upstream, and twin paddles.

While they'd gotten the construction of the craft relatively down pat, they had not yet invented the kayak paddle. Fortunately, Teal'c had been catching up on his reruns of MacGyver, and now a roll of duct tape was permanently installed in the big Jaffa's BDUs.

Jack slung the Knight SR-25 over his shoulder, picked up the unwieldy melding of two oars and duct tape, and began his pursuit.

It wasn't hard to follow the barge – those twin moons kept everything despicably lit, and the telltale engine noise gave away their diverging into a small tributary. The current was still quite swift, and there was no doubt he was losing ground in his paddling battle when he heard their engine cut.

So that was how they'd gotten to them so damn fast.

He worked faster, forcing tiring back and chest muscles to pull against the water, and he made the turn up to the tributary just until the barge was in sight. He dumped the kayak, leaping lightly to a rocky outcropping, and pulled a service handgun out of its holster.

The rifle was no good in close combat with this many targets.

O'Neill jogged up the bank, keeping slightly in the trees for cover. There was no real need for the caution; there was nothing around. He hadn't even recalled seeing a service road in this area, was it possible the second facility would be so close to the city? Maybe that was how he'd managed to smuggle some of the goa'uld equipment out of the Seat without Tocker's knowledge.

Not that Jack was considering Tocker ignorant of the current situation. He simply couldn't prove it.

The puzzle fit together just too damn well. Martel the Profate spy, playing off the soldiers' frustration with Tocker's policies and convincing them he would lead them to a final victory, if only they could get the current Paraclet administration out of office.

Even if it meant completely destroying the city where the soldiers kept their houses, wives, husbands, children, and dogs.

That was the part that just didn't add up. Why would the soldiers so willingly turn on the only city they'd ever called home, when there was literally no where else on the planet to go for such a lifestyle? Two of the remaining cities were domain of the Profates, and the other two cities – towns, comparatively – were filled with the unwanted of both cultures. Once the Paraclet city was destroyed, there would be no point in a Paraclet military.

Which would work to the first supposition, but only until Martel toasted the city. Then his soldiers would toast him.

Unless he had a Profate contingent waiting to kill the Paraclet militia after they secured the weapon?

Teal'c would have finished with the UAV by now – battery power wouldn't allow too much time in the air, not with the signal as crappy as it was. If there were any unusual subterranean spaces, he would have mapped them. There had certainly been no Profate army in view of the UAV that was alive – no heat signatures.

It had only taken them minutes to locate Carter and Daniel. Teal'c had their position by the time O'Neill had come back through the gate. It had just taken too damn long to get to them. Too long to get back home, explain the situation to Hammond, acquire permission, gas up the UAV, launch the UAV, and pick up a little package from his locker.

Three years ago it wouldn't have gone down like this.

Just went to show what too much hanging around Daniel Jackson could do to a man.

"Does Euronda sound familiar to anyone?"

Carter had opened her mouth but wisely decided to close it again. Jack wasn't as wise, and wasn't too fond of the memory. It hadn't been his best day ever.

"Daniel, this isn't the same situation –"

"You're right. The Eurondans offered us a hundred years' worth of technology. The Paraclets are offering us a fifteen minute battery extension."

"Daniel, they're fighting over religion and land. This isn't ethnic cleansing."

Daniel had turned then on Sam. "And the Crusades weren't targeting – look. I know it's not to the same extremes, but let's . . . just ask a few more questions before we start diplomatic relations with these people. There may be a reason their opposition is twice as powerful. Who knows? I'm not asking for us to sever ties, just . . . get a chance to see how the other side lives before we sign a trade agreement."

He'd rolled his eyes at the time and let Daniel ask away. Let Daniel accompany Samantha to the Seat, to see footage of the Profates in action, analyze their battle strategies while Carter geeked out over all the gouldy goodies the Paraclets didn't understand.

They'd just stepped right into it this time.

No. This was not some Profate scheme. This was a Paraclet scheme. They were losing the war, weren't making enough advancements on their own. Martel and Tocker had discovered that they understood how goa'uld technology functioned, and . . . maybe Tocker really was the fool. Maybe Martel had told him that abducting the Tau'ri would cause them to retaliate on the Profates, so he wouldn't have to get his great big mitts bloody, and all the while Martel simply planned to use Carter to annihilate the Profates.

Or maybe he planned to annihilate Tocker. Hopefully Carter knew one way or the other, or Hammond was going to kill him when they got back.

He finished his jog, crouching down behind a thick grove of cypress trees. The boat had been docked, in a way, and the group was gathered around a large cargo truck and a pair of . . .jeeps, for lack of a better synonym. A very small, mostly overgrown track ran along the bank, then turned sharply inland. It didn't look well-used.

Cars. Shit.

They'd already loaded the prisoners; he could see Carter glaring from beneath the black fabric that covered the skeleton of the back of the truck. Two of the guards were invisible, and two more were in the cab of the truck. The soldiers didn't seem too familiar with their directions; he could hear Martel telling them which entrance to use. Then he and one of the officers took the lead jeep, and the remaining four guards took the second.

O'Neill wasn't really in the mood for a ten mile run.

He had to get onto that truck.

It was old-school, just a sideless, flatbed truck with four rectangular steel beams overhead, which they had attached the black canvas to. He'd easily be seen if he attempted to jump onto the top of it, and if he stayed on the top of the cab he'd be visible in the rear view mirror of the jeep ahead.

Shit.

The engines started up, not with the low, diesel growl, but the tuning of a room of two year old Suzuki string players. They didn't need a warm-up either; the first jeep was already pulling away.

Too quickly to reconsider, he darted out from behind the cypress trees, crouched as low as he could, and sprinted for the side of the truck. He yanked on the shoulder-strap of the Mk 11, flipping it around so it was in front of him. If the driver-side guards spotted him –

But they didn't. He spun at the last second, sliding beneath the truck just as the wheels began to turn. Quick as thought he jammed the rifle into the frame of the truck, scrambling to find a place to tuck his feet –

Edge of the bottom of the wheel wells.

Above him, he heard one of the guards laughing.

- . -

A number of hours passed in a kind of sleepy haze. She was aware that the truck had to often slow, take sharp turns, but it barely woke her. The guards left her alone, after a few retaliatory kicks from the guard with the broken nose they'd contented themselves with looking out the back of the truck and smoking.

But she didn't pay them any attention.

She wasn't sure Daniel was breathing anymore.

The trip on the boat hadn't done him any favors, and now the jostling they were getting was only going to make the internal bleeding worse. He hadn't really stabilized even in the woods, and when she was conscious she watched him.

If he just hung on, if Martel was telling the truth . . . there was a chance.

She didn't let herself think too far past saving Daniel's life. Then she'd have to consider if she could make the same decision twice. Sabotage the work, possibly at the cost of their lives, or refuse outright, and watch them take it out on Daniel. She wasn't sure Martel realized that she had meant the entire base to go up. She hadn't gotten a chance to view their naquadah-refining techniques, so there had been no way of knowing what the percentage of raw naquadah to rock had been in the foundations of the Seat. She had figured about eight percent, given what she'd seen in the city and the sample she'd taken.

But the naquadah was measured by ear, by engineer, it was a non-standard recipe. And their refining techniques had improved after they'd built the original rings, so it was bound to have less of the raw ore. But even so, 8 percent should have more than done it. Even five percent and the place should have gone.

The crawlspace had proved fatal. Facilitated the escape of energy from the main focus.

No, she didn't think he'd made that leap.

She'd made her calculations knowing if she was right, she and Daniel would be killed along with the destruction of the base.

It had been the only way to keep the plasma cannon from being used.

"You're not a Profate spy," Daniel had said, quite calmly, and absolutely certainly. And as soon as it came out of his mouth, she'd known it was truth.

Martel hadn't looked particularly displeased about the revelation. "And how did you come by this conclusion, Dr. Jackson?"

"The engineer over there? The one messing with that . . . ah . . .-"

She'd looked up from the screen to follow his gaze, where two technicians were moving the main crystal control board .

"Central processor."

"The central processor. Thank you. The one in the orange cap, he's a Profate spy."

She'd stopped typing for a split second, and she wasn't sure it hadn't been noticed by the technician beside her.

"How did you get that number?"

"Trig." She glanced again at Martel, who looked – stunned. It was the only word she could think of. His perfectly manicured eyebrows were crawling for his hairline.

"His voice is accented, particularly his n's. It's a telltale sign his first language was French." Daniel looked back at Martel. "And that means yours wasn't. You're no spy. Traitor, maybe, but not a spy."

She couldn't pay as much attention to their conversation as she would have liked. Clearly Daniel was attempting to create a diversion, but they were so deep in the complex, running wasn't likely . . . and she couldn't be sure Martel wasn't going to turn the weapon on his own city. The plasma cannon, without losing any of the material to the atmosphere, would vaporize the city, and everyone in it.

And possibly the Stargate.

And she wasn't going to be responsible for that.

"That's not going to be enough."

She'd glared at the technician – Mira, had been her name? "Yes, it is. Anything more and we risk feedback –"

"We've already tested at these levels, Major. The best it would do is create a small plasma event. It would be visible from the city." Then she stopped, and her mouth dropped open, her expression like someone who had just caught a child red-handed in the cookie jar.

Martel had already motioned for his guards, doubtlessly to capture the spy Daniel had identified. If they could make it to the south door, they might have a shot –

He'd seen her glance.

Martel calmly pulled his sidearm free, and leveled it at Daniel's head. Jackson opened his mouth to protest, thought better of it, and then carefully didn't look her way.

Shit.

"These power levels would do nothing more than warn the city we were about to fire," Mira informed her general smartly.

Carter wanted to hit her in the mouth.

The hangar that housed the transplanted goa'uld technology was large, easily fifty feet tall and some eighty yards in length. It was completely tiled in light green, and filled with equipment that wouldn't look out of place in the props warehouse of "The Day The Earth Stood Still." Nothing to take cover behind, certainly nothing she could use as a weapon.

Except the generator.

The only city in sight was the Paraclets'. That had to be his main target.

But if he wasn't a Profate spy, then why . . . ?

"Are you attempting to sabotage the attempt, Major?" Their weapons all seemed to be automatic, so he couldn't cock the gun for effect, but she got the message.

No, but now I'm considering it.

"Mira?"

The lead scientist on the plasma cannon project was staring at her screen, where readouts were scrolling by. "The interface is working," she finally said. "I can probably make a go at this, give me two or three days and –"

"I'm afraid we don't have that kind of time, my dear." His gun was perfectly steady, and Daniel looked from him to Mira, very calmly.

It wasn't the first time he'd been held at gunpoint, she reflected.

"The Assemblage can prevent the city contingent from infiltrating the base." Mira used a thin finger to tuck an errant lock of hair behind her ear. "I think we've got enough to –"

"Major Carter, please continue. If Mira questions you again, I will kill your colleague."

"Well, what's the rush? If you can hold the base for a few days . . ." Daniel left it hanging, and Martel, oddly, lowered his weapon and reholstered it.

"I'm afraid there's more than one target, and I really would prefer not to give them too much notice before they're wiped out." He said it conversationally. "I don't really have the manpower to go through the woods and deserts, ferreting out the survivors."

It didn't occur to her at first why she should be alarmed by this news – there were two Profate cities, so destroying all three would make him the undisputed king of the other two. Still, utterly wiping out the cities and the survivors would make him the king of nothing . . .

She didn't give it much more thought until she noticed that Daniel had completely shut down.

"You're out of your mind."

"And out of time. Major, my patience will only extend another few moments."

Destroying three cities, he'd wipe out the cultures. Religious wars. Maybe that was the point, to end the religious conflict on the planet by slaughtering all the participants?

Okay. So it was like Euronda. He'd been right.

"What's the range of the farthest target." She could force the targeting off by as much as a hundred miles without making it obvious, but they'd figure it out immediately after they missed the first. It would buy them little time, but at least it would get the message to the colonel and Teal'c that they needed to get the city evacuated.

"Here's the coordinates." Mira had already opened a thick black binder, and she pointed at the fifth target.

It was almost halfway across the planet. She didn't remember a Profate city that far out.

In fact, she was pretty sure that city was considered one of the penal settlements-

And then she understood.

He meant to wipe everyone out. Every large population of human beings on the planet.

And apparently everyone in the facility supported that plan.

She stopped, shocked, and turned to look at him. "You can't-"

"I can, in fact. Please, to your work? You're far too easily distracted."

Distracted.

She was.

Because they were there.

The truck had apparently just lurched to a stop, and the guards were stirring, already jumping out of the truck. There was no tailgate on the back of the truck, so she took the 'fall out gracefully' approach, careful to put all her weight on her left leg. The guard whose nose she had broken in the scuffle in the river was content to glare at her, one hand on his firearm, but the other turned his back to her to grab Daniel's feet.

She might be able to get the first guard's gun, hit the second, and then – but there was nowhere to go.

The jeeps and truck had stopped in a sort of badly landscaped Hollywood soundstage. Clearly the area had been cleared for the construction of the facility, but fake trees and somewhat unnatural-looking rocks had been placed to hide the fact that there was a sizable parking area, and building materials still sat in piles beneath green-painted canvas.

Of course. Their aerial photography wasn't very advanced. To the average military technician, nothing would be outstanding about the place. The resolution on their pictures would be so bad she wasn't even sure the fake trees would even be visible, much less tree-shaped.

They eventually ran into the real woods, which were more deciduous forest. The river was nowhere in sight, so there would be no easy escape by water. The trees were too dense to take the trucks, but there was no way she could outrun them, not without a sizable head start. Still, it would be possible to find a good hiding spot –

But her right arm was still weak. No climbing the trees.

No, there was no escape that wouldn't result in her immediate recapture or death. And death without saving Daniel was worthless.

Once the second guard had tossed Daniel's limp form over his shoulder, they half dragged, half pushed her towards a huge, gymnasium-like structure, coated in the same polymer as the Seat had been. It was hard to see in the dark exactly how large it was, but once inside she could see it was quite tall. It might have at one time been designed as a launching site for an airborne vehicle, but now it was crowded into small dorm-roomed sized offices containing tiny laboratories.

And it had tiled ceilings, so it likely also had the crawlspace. Which would be good to take into account this time.

If they gave her the chance.

She was led through a few right-angled, uniformed halls, all painted the same beige as the Seat inner ring had been, and tiled in the same light green. The narrow halls all dumped into a main lab, which boasted a thirty foot ceiling, and the majority of the building space. It was filled from floor to ceiling with metal shelves, groaning with goa'uld objects including half a ring platform, a spare death glider cockpit, countless crystal boards, dozens of boxes of control crystals, and the missing stabilizer. There were other components she didn't even recognize out of context.

And that was just in the first aisle. A glance told her there were fifteen.

She blinked, willing herself not to visibly blanch.

This was impossible. She couldn't make a working toaster out of this junk.

"Your colleague has just been placed in the healing device," Martel called out of another doorway. Apparently all the side labs dumped into this one, too. Gave her multiple ways out of the building, at any rate.

Not that she'd leave without him.

"I would suggest that you get to work."

He disappeared back into the side lab and closed the windowless beige door. Her two guards took up stations beside the main door, which was on the wall with the others. They'd easily catch her before she made it through any of them.

But she'd already decided running was out of the question anyway.

Carter resisted shaking her head, instead steeling herself and approaching the first stack. She found a broken healing device as well as the skeleton of a ribbon device, but the powered jewel in the center was conspicuously absent. It had been an obvious power source and likely used in the initial tests of the Paraclet rocket technology.

Thirty minutes of searching turned up a mostly spent staff weapon cartridge, the main shaft of the secondary drive, and something that resembled a board game. The third she had just tossed away, willing herself to lean up from her crouch. Her back, which had been kindly dulled, was not at all happy about being struck by Martel, was less happy about being soaked in the river again, and by the time the truck ride had stopped, if not for her exhaustion the pain would have brought her near tears. There was no doubt now that her sciatic nerve was one of the offended portions; the pain radiated from the back of her knee all the way up to end behind her right eye.

Standing made it slightly better, but the smaller items had been grouped into wooden crates near the bottom, and it was in there that she hoped to find something she could at least piece together.

He wanted a city-destroying weapon. Without the plasma cannon, the only other technology that could be used to destroy a target a thousand miles away . . .

Well, the aux engine could conceivably create enough power, they'd just need a focus and of course a computer capable of measuring and altering energy output. Could she make it from this junk?

Sam stared at her paltry collection of devices, swallowing down a lump and a bitter taste in her mouth. Yes. With two months, assistants, and equipment from her lab back home, she could probably fashion a pretty decent ion cannon.

She wondered which disease they'd be on with Daniel in two months' time.

It was almost as though Martel could hear her thoughts.

"Major Carter! How much progress have you made?"

- . -

Carter looked dead on her feet.

He very gently dropped the ceiling tile and shifted quietly, keeping off the insulation as much as possible. He wasn't sure they hadn't laced their fiberglass with naquadah too, and he didn't want to have to explain why he had a radioactive rash back at the base. Doc Frasier would never let him forget it.

Luckily they'd designed this building before they'd started building it, and there were no more fire walls between him and the outer wall. They'd been beginning to become a hindrance.

He began to edge out across the ceiling, transferring his weight very slowly. The tiles were fairly thin, flexible, and not strong enough to prevent him from crashing through them if he gave them the slightest opportunity. He needed to get over one of the shelving units; the ceiling was too high to do a drop, even onto one of the guards. His knees wouldn't take that kind of fall.

He could hear the conversation beneath him fairly well, which bothered him, because it meant they could also hear him. Moving across ceiling tiles without breaking or dislodging one would have been an impossible process. Luckily, since the below room was a lab complete with benches, they'd run an entire bevy of water pipes through the ceiling to ensure every bench could have multiple sinks, and they were secured to the concrete ceiling with thick metal bolts. They were about four and a half feet apart, and he'd hooked his ankles over them, using the electric cables to pull himself along.

It wasn't the most efficient process, and his already tired legs were starting to tremble with the exertion.

He'd very nearly not made that two hour truck ride. Several times he'd considered just dropping and having Teal'c track them, but he realized that he was likely far out of conventional radio range. Teal'c likely had their position, but O'Neill wasn't sure Tocker would give him the resources he needed to lend a hand.

And it wasn't necessary. Not yet. So long as Teal'c could keep the Paraclets from interfering, at least until they figured out what Martel's true motivations were, he could extract Daniel and Carter.

Speaking of which . . .

He carefully maneuvered himself around one of the braces that secured the pipes to the wall, identifying the speaking voice as Martel.

"You'll be pleased to know that despite Dr. Jackson's advanced injuries, it appears he has been completely restored to full health."

Carter didn't respond to him, and Jack gritted his teeth as his left ankle began to curl in a classic muscle cramp.

"A thank you would be in order, Major Carter. I didn't have to save his life."

"You didn't know . . . it would work." Her voice was nothing more than a foot rasp being drawn over ancient calluses. "Otherwise . . . you would have used it . .. yourself, earlier."

There was a silence from below. "You have not yet formally accepted my proposition, Major Carter."

That didn't sound good at all.

"What have you found?"

There was a good long pause, which he assumed was Carter trying to formulate a suitable response. So she'd promised to make something out of all those piles of crap in return for a sarcophagus trip for Daniel?

"It's . . . going to take a long time-"

"Oh, dear woman, I'm not the one you have to explain that to."

Jack slowly worked the ankle, willing the cramp to ease itself out. He needed to get another five or six meters at least, take another look down there to get his position. There was no guarantee the rows of shelves had been laid perfectly parallel with the pipes.

There was motion from below, footsteps.

"Daniel – are you alright?" Her voice was getting quickly worse.

It sounded like she could use a little pick-me-up in the sarcophagus herself. He wasn't sure they could swing it, but it was worth considering.

"Yeah, I'm good. Seem to have lost a shoe somewhere-"

There was the unmistakable sound of something hard striking something firm, and then a grunt of released air. It was masculine, and sounded distinctly irritated.

"Did you know the Profates prophesized your coming?"

"Me particularly, or –"

Another solid thud.

Dammit, Daniel, when are you going to learn to keep your mouth shut?

"It was said when an angel returned to Loesh, and saw that Man still lived, he would choose one Man, one vessel, and pour into him such power that all the land would be torn asunder."

"I think I recall that already happened?"

Curiously, there was only silence, and Jack risked leaning down and lifting one of the ceiling tiles.

He was almost directly over Carter, who was standing beside a small collection of assorted . . . crap. Her shoulders were sagging and she was leaning heavily to her left. He couldn't see much of her expression.

That put Martel and Jackson behind him about twenty feet. That would be enough space.

He ever so softly laid the tile back down, and tightened his thighs, using them as much as his left arm to haul himself back up.

Another five tiles, and he'd be there.

- . -

Shut up, Daniel. Shut up.

He had that offended look he sometimes adopted when he was being tortured for telling the truth, but he was whole. Seeing. His glasses were long gone, and his eyes were unfiltered and calm.

Nothing like the look she'd gotten from him when they'd both made that leap of understanding.

Exactly like the look she'd gotten from him when they'd made their bid to escape.

Sam took a deep breath, biting a stray flake of dry skin from her bottom lip. There was nothing she could do with this stuff. No repeat. Nothing she could even use to make a diversion, not really. Martel had to know that what he'd kept in this facility had been worthless. Judging from the neat, round writing on the wooden crates, this was all stuff Mira had weeded out of their runs to Babi's mothership. He had to know that everything that had had some ballistic value had been destroyed with the Seat.

But now she realized he didn't. Not because it wasn't obvious, but because he was long past logic.

"Yes. Unexpected, but it hardly destroyed the world, did it."

"Are you sure the passage read "tore all the land asunder," instead of "tore the land all asunder?" Because-"

Martel raised his hand, and Daniel closed his mouth.

The ex-Paraclet general struck him anyway.

Martel was just going to beat him to death. And bring him back. Like Ba'al had done with O'Neill.

Sam blinked quickly as Martel looked back at her, trying to judge if his tactic was working.

"How much time, do you think, it will take you to create a weapon from these components? I'd like Dr. Jackson to know how many times he must die for your mistake."

She glanced upward, the movement involuntary and the only expression of her despair that leaked through. God, if she wasn't so tired, she could come up with a plan, with a lie, with something -

A small fluff, much like a very large snowflake, caught her attention. It was drifting gently towards her, being carried on the current of the air handling system, and its dance was so reminiscent of the ashes she'd watched not ten hours ago-

Carter brought her face back down, couldn't bear to look at it. A stray piece of insulation. Nothing more. A tear she hadn't really felt escaped down her cheek.

"You're right, General. You're right. I screwed up. I miscalculated."

Daniel tried to catch her eyes, but she continued to stare at Martel. "Sam-"

"No." She threw a very calm look at Daniel. "It's true. I didn't intend that explosion to happen the way it did."

Daniel cocked his head, ever so slightly, to the side, and then shook it, barely perceptibly.

But Martel pursued it, smelling blood. "You didn't intend to be caught."

He wanted to destroy the world? She'd give him a means. "I didn't intend to survive."

Martel gaped at her.

"Yeah, I sort of wondered why you didn't have everything blow up all at once," Daniel noted conversationally, though his expression indicated he didn't know where she was going with it. "I mean, you blew up a sun, so I figured one little base wasn't going to –" Then he caught himself.

But she realized instantly that it wasn't a slip. He'd done it on purpose.

Martel wasn't so easily sidetracked. "You . . . you destroyed . . ."

She nodded, trying to look miserable. "I only had a few seconds, and Mira was watching . . . my every move." Her throat was dry; it was hard to force it all out. "I had planned to overload the main generator with enough force to catch the secondary, triggering . . . the second explosion almost immediately after the first. The naquadah, that you add to walls, it would have been ignited by those twin explosions and itself become a third bomb."

Martel seemed to have caught on to what Daniel had said previously. "Does he speak the truth? You have destroyed a sun?"

She nodded slowly. "Yes. It took the entire solar system with it."

"And you say you can cause the city walls to become bombs?"

She spread her hands helplessly, still trying for a defeated look. "Not with . . . not with this. The only power sources you had were in the Seat. There's . . . nothing here I can use."

But Martel didn't hear her words. He was too caught up in the glorious idea of blowing up the sun, and the poetic image of using the very city walls that had protected their cities for their entire free history to destroy . . . everything.

After all, she only needed to buy a few days. The SGC would find a way to penetrate the polymer with something, maybe sonar, and they'd locate the facility. It was obvious Tocker didn't know how close to death he'd come, so he shouldn't cause the Colonel and Teal'c too much trouble.

"Just outside of this facility are three barracks, filled with soldiers loyal to me. With their aid, could you complete your task more quickly?"

"Maybe." It was her last card. "I think . . . I think I could arrange it in . . . three days, maybe, if I didn't have distractions."

Martel's eyes narrowed, a bit shrewdly. "If you only had to worry about completing the task, you think you could finish faster?"

Shit. Shit shit shit. She could tell by the gleam in his eye that she'd just crossed the line.

She and Daniel locked gazes again, and he gave her a small smile. His expression was serene.

Oh god.

Martel's face shifted quietly, from an expression of consideration to one of assumed piety.

"Then we'd better take Dr. Jackson out of the equation."

And he turned on his heels, very precisely, and drew his gun.

"Wait-" She had nothing else to offer him, and the knowledge that he could bring Daniel back was tainted with the knowledge that he could just do this again, and again, for days, for all the time it took O'Neill and Teal'c to find her –

Inexplicably, the head of the guard that was restraining Daniel on the left exploded, misting the remaining trio with a fine cloud of blood.

Daniel recovered faster than she did. He immediately swung his freed left arm in a wide arc, forcing Martel to dodge backwards, and the momentum of it helped Daniel shoulder-check the guard that still had his right arm.

Martel had staggered back a step, looking around the room wildly, and his eyes fell on her.

"You-!"

In the space of time it took her to blink, he had brought the gun around to her, and Daniel was oblivious, still wrestling with his opponent. The ex-general was ten feet away at least, there was no way for her to cover that distance, disarm him.

She didn't even flinch.

He never got a chance to fire. The bullet went quite cleanly through his head, directly between his eyes, and he fell back, eyes still wide with rage.

Sam dared to take a breath, and then stared straight up.

One of the ceiling tiles was gone, and a figure in black ops gear, holding what looked like a SEALS-issue sniper rifle, was hanging by his legs from some support structure within the ceiling. She knew who it was instantly, but didn't dare to believe her eyes.

Daniel was getting the worst of it from the guard that was still wrestling with him, and when he threw Jackson into the wall and stepped back, Jack put a round into his heart.

The rifle was suppressed, but there was no doubt someone would come looking eventually. All the doors out led into the small labs, it would be almost impossible to get out without being spotted. Carter limped over to the shelving unit that lay just under O'Neill's position and grabbed the main sidepoles.

"I've got it, sir."

He glanced down at her, his face smudged with black paint, his trademark black cotton ski hat covered in what looked like ash-

Insulation.

He nodded, freeing the rifle and dropping it by strap onto the shelf before snagging the metal framework the tiles lay across and dropping. The framework bent badly, but it gave enough support to allow him to flip, landing neatly on feet in a low crouch. The shelving unit was quite tall and thus unstable, and she pushed against the rocking with all her strength.

It seemed to take no time for him to move down the shelves to her, and in a heartbeat he was standing beside her, as large as life. How had he found them, gotten there so quickly –

"Later, Major. You okay?"

She blinked, opened and closed her mouth, and then nodded. He seemed to look her up and down for a moment, then glanced back at Daniel. Jackson had liberated one of the guns from the guards, and was scrounging through their uniforms for a spare clip. He seemed to sense Jack's gaze, and they exchanged an unreadable look.

"How many?"

Jack was looking at her again. All business.

"Oh. Ah . . . the labs were almost empty. Just the guards on the boat, so . . . six? Seven?"

Daniel had found what he was looking for, and jogged over, tucking the spare clips in his pockets. His footsteps were uneven, the boot on his right foot made that leg two inches taller than his left. "The mention of the three barracks of soldiers has me a little worried . . . shall we?"

"Major, can you walk?"

Not really. "I can make it."

He gave her that measuring look again, like she was a gas tank and he was considering the odds of making it across the Mojave with her. "We head for the jeeps. I'll take point. Daniel, bring up the rear."

He was pressing his secondary into her hands. She automatically chambered a round, found the safety was already off.

Then he was off, and she was following as best she could.

They made it through the first hallway without being spotted, and she was beginning to hope when Daniel spoke.

"Guys? Isn't that a -"

An earsplitting wail shattered the tense calm of the hallway.

"-camera?"

Colonel O'Neill didn't bother with a response. "Go. Go, go!"

Carter limped along behind him as best she could, hating her weakness. Her spine and leg were screaming dully, not even in a wave with more intense pain followed by shallow relief. There was no relief. She was already winded, if they had to run much farther than the jeeps she wasn't going to make it.

They exploded out the side of the building, back into the same oddly landscaped natural setting. Only a half-hour ago the truck and two jeeps had been there, but now it was an empty clearing, save the covered piles of supplies.

No vehicles.

To their right, suddenly, they heard a shout, followed by another.

O'Neill was looking the piles of supplies up and down, probably trying to find a good place for a last stand –

A jeep whined out of the woods, the way she'd originally come, its ultra-bright headlights blinding as it flew around the last turn. Daniel raised his gun as the beams centered directly on them, and the jeep suddenly careened to the left, skidding to a stop not twenty yards away.

"O'Neill!"

Sam almost choked as she recognized the voice, and without another word they raced for the jeep. O'Neill grabbed her right arm and almost bodily dragged her the last few yards. Then she was climbing in, and he was stepping onto the running board, and they were moving.

A few shots were exchanged, but by the time she had gotten herself into a sitting position and turned around, Teal'c had taken them back around the bend and they were out of direct line of sight.

The electric motor was almost screaming, and despite its design it was moving them along at a decent clip.

"The militia's unfamiliar with the roads," she shouted over the wind, and the big Jaffa nodded to indicate that he'd heard her.

"Teal'c, I thought I told you to stay by the gate," O'Neill bellowed.

Teal'c didn't dare take his eyes off the winding, badly marked service road. "I do not recall your thought," he threw back over his shoulder.

"How do you plan to get us back through the gate?"

"I believe my elevated status in this culture will assist us."

"How's that?"

"I told the city contingent that I would smite them if they did not."

- . -

"Hey, Sam."

The blonde major's eyes were crawling open, a little sluggishly. Probably still working the narcotics out of her system. Janet reached over, gently pulling an eyelid up to check her pupils.

Not too dilated. Good.

Sam blinked a few times against the dimmed lights of the private room, then took a deeper breath.

"What time is it?"

"About eight am." The question reminded her to mark it in the chart, and she grabbed a ballpoint out of her coat pocket, going around to the foot of the bed to fetch the chart. "You slept the whole night."

She nodded, closing her eyes again and relaxing against the light blue pillow.

"I'll be back in a second to check on you. You ready for breakfast yet?"

Her eyes stayed closed. "No. Thank you."

"Sam, you have to eat."

A slight smile. "Yes, mom."

"Oh, good one, Sam. You need to teach that to Cassandra."

Janet finished the notation, checked it against her watch, and replaced the chart. She left the room, heading briskly back to the main infirmary, and was held up at the door by a tray. It was rather unassuming, all things told. It bore a tall glass of blue jello, a well-sugared bowl of oatmeal, a glass of orange juice, and a bowl of what she figured must be fruit loops.

It was trying to hide the figure of Colonel Jack O'Neill behind it, but it was small and thin and not up to the task.

She hid a smile behind her hand. "Good luck, colonel."

He flashed her a quick grin and headed down the hall. "I don't think she's in the mood to talk," the diminutive doctor finished to the empty room, regretfully picking up an x-ray folder.

- . -

He put the tray down on the lap table, making a point of separating the area that contained her breakfast – she assumed the oatmeal and jello was for her – and for his fruit loops. Then he found a stool and settled down in the way that only Jack O'Neill could. It was a certain . . . flop, almost, that made anything, even a glacier in Antarctica, look comfortable.

It was a side of him that he usually only showed to little kids.

The implication there wasn't particularly flattering.

"So, I hear from the doc that you're going to be okay."

She nodded, finally taking the glass of orange juice just to have something to do with her hands. God, she hated it when things were awkward like this.

"Yeah, Janet said I was really lucky. The pain's down, and I should be up and out of here by tomorrow." She tried to put a happy little smile on the end of it, but let it die when she saw Jack's expression.

"Has General Hammond debriefed you yet?"

She paused, then shook her head. She was almost glad; that way Hammond would know which questions to ask, would have some idea of what had happened, let her pass over the hard things without needing the little details.

"Daniel seems to think that Tocker wasn't in on it."

She 'hmmed' noncommittally and sipped the orange juice.

"He doesn't remember, you know."

She spluttered, choking slightly on a half-swallowed sip of juice. "Who?" Then, "What?"

O'Neill didn't look surprised, and stuffed a spoonful of fruit loops in his mouth. "Dannel."

Daniel.

She remained silent, listening to the heart monitor on her left and the crunch and swallowing of food. Her stomach had that cold pit again, and she took another sip of juice in an effort to drown it.

"Well, he remembers agreeing to blow himself up. Just not much after the actual . . . blowing up." He was watching her steadily, and she felt as though she were giving something away.

"You sort of crashed in the jeep. Missed kind of an interesting party back in the city."

She feigned interest, and he feigned a desire to tell the story.

"Teal'c had convinced some of the younger guys of the guard –"

"You were there, weren't you. You followed us up the river."

It just blurted out of her. She didn't dare look at him, heard him put his plastic spoon down.

"Yeah." A pause. "We found the fire."

So he had been there. He'd seen.

"Sir, I-"

"I don't want to hear it, Major." She glanced up at him, involuntarily, at the steel in his voice, and saw that all pretenses that this wasn't one of those conversations was gone.

"You made a decision. You kept goa'uld weaponry that could have been used against earth out of the hands of a – a fruit loop." He winced slightly at his choice of words, and scooted the cereal bowl aside. "Then you did your best to protect the teammate you had with you, at great risk to yourself. You've done it before. This is no different."

"No, I . . ." She hesitated, then looked him full in the face. "How'd you get General Hammond to okay the op?"

It sounded funny to her ears. It hadn't been what she'd meant to say at all.

O'Neill didn't seem surprised. "As soon as the Seat blew, and it wasn't your best explosion," he added as an afterthought, "I headed back. The general believed my suspicion that Martel wasn't really acting for the Profates, and we both agreed Tocker would use the incident to force us to fight his war. He agreed to the extraction if I could prove either of you survived."

There was a touch of smile in his lips. "We did, thanks to a little fire and a UAV, and as soon as we had your position we staged an argument."

"Staged?"

"The usual. Hammond giving me orders, me refusing them." He shrugged and ate another mouthful of cereal. "It took me too long to get upriver. I'm sorry, Carter."

"But what about the iron?"

Jack stared at her as though he'd never seen her before. "I'm going to quote a kind of annoying friend who once said, does Euronda sound familiar?"

She opened her mouth, but nothing else frivolous came out, so she closed it again.

He was doing that smile at her again. That Hans Solo smile from whatever Empire was striking, that Teal'c had made her watch four times.

"Besides, we haven't completely cut them out of the picture. Tocker is claiming to know nothing of the incident and Daniel doesn't remember anything to give us proof to dispute him." He left it hanging.

"Sir?"

"Yeah?"

She found the orange juice glass was still in her hand, and she studied it carefully. "I know how much you hate that rifle. I . . . thank you."

O'Neill looked completely stunned for a moment, then he hid it with a gruff shrug. "It's not the rifle's fault."

And he ate his fruit loops, and she drank her orange juice.


End file.
